This summer, when a large family trip to Germany was cancelled, we decided instead to visit Chicago, a city that my wife Charissa has never been to, and that I have only been to once when I was 14. We did plenty of touristy things, like taking in the museums and Navy Pier and the chrome bean in Millennium Park, but we also branched out to visit the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge in the near west side, a dive Pierogi restaurant underneath the "L" train, a rich-people neighborhood north of downtown where we found an early Frank Lloyd Wright (designed with Louis Sullivan), and a small chocolate shop in Old Town where one can buy a chocolate popsicle shaped like the Star of David or a chocolate Colt 1911. I even got us going the wrong direction on the green line and took a ride through the high rise projects in south Chicago.
On about the third day, we began to notice just how often we were hearing references to the "suburbs." Obviously, this isn't particularly uncommon in cities, but something was different about the way Chicagoans use the word--with a kind of tone of voice. The word was used as a kind of blanket to refer not to a place so much as a nebulous concept. In seven days, I never heard the actual name of a town, but rather only heard references to the generic "suburbs." One of the more telling uses of "suburbs" came from the semi-official language of television news, when an anchor discussed a large traffic accident on an inbound interstate, mentioning that "police, along with 'suburban' departments" were on scene. "Police" meant Chicago PD. Meanwhile, the "suburban" departments were not named. Even in the official discourse of the news, there seemed to be Chicago and everywhere else. Charissa even overheard a conversation in Wrigley field where a woman told a Chicagoan that she lived "in the suburb northwest of here," as if even a local would not have known where she was talking about if she had used the name of the town.
These are just a couple examples of this usage that we heard over and over. I have never been in a city that has such a self-conscious divide between city and suburb. I asked a architectural tour guide (one of those touristy things we did) about this, asking him why people seemed to have such disdain in their voices when they used the word "suburbs" here. He rolled his eyes and explained this a couple ways. First he said that people who live in the suburbs are "always telling people they live in Chicago, but they don't." This explanation is pretty common in big cities, even in Oklahoma City. The more telling explanation to me, which seemed an aside for him was this: "When I go out there, I get lost." A similar sentiment was echoed by my friend Michael, who we met for lunch while we were there. I forgot to ask him specifically about this issue (though I planned to) but at one point I complained about my own recent move to a suburban neighborhood and how I couldn't bike everywhere anymore. He mentioned that his wife's parents live in the "suburbs" near Chicago and that every time he "goes out there," he realizes that suburban life is not for him.
People in Chicago and people in its suburbs just don't seem to mix much. Chicago, an old city with lots of open land around it, may have the most meaningful divide between the city and the rail-road suburb of any city I've visited. In an old and compact city like Boston, you'd have to drive a long way before you're in a suburb that actually feels suburban. Many of Boston's suburbs still feel very urban, so the distinction between Boston and Belmont down't feel so extreme. Meanwhile, Los Angeles, the nation's second largest city but a relative late bloomer built after the advent of the automobile, is itself almost entirely suburban, so the difference between city and suburbs there is a technicality. In Chicago, on the other hand, the city itself is classically urban, while the suburbs are definitively suburban.
The distance between the two is not a simple matter of heavy inbound traffic, but of the two different lifestyles that have come to define urban living versus suburban living. Chicago, then, is an interesting laboratory in what makes these lifestyles different and, perhaps, incompatible. It would have been interesting to have explores the suburbs and heard from people "out there." But, alas, the suburban transit lines cost extra.
