They Call Me Mister MGB

Al Ribskis' MGB in the Victory Lane at Road America 

Al Ribskis locates TECH RacinGraphics, his custom race-car helmet business, at a point 150 miles south of Road America and 180 miles north of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.  That’s one more set of coordinates that place Bridgeport more or less at the center of things, though the route he arrived by has been more like the historic road course, with its wooded moraines and its 14 turns, than an ovoid track.

Al grew up in Bridgeport, in an apartment at 3139 South Emerald; he graduated De LaSalle High School, Class of 1975.  His mother hoped he’d follow the path of his older brother, who got his engineering degree from UIC, took at a job after college, and stayed at the same company his entire career.  It was an interesting job, assessing risk for big structures like stadiums and convention centers, but still an unusual employment trajectory, especially for his era.

Al enrolled at UIC for 2 years after high school, but says he was distracted by a youthful bout of cynicism.  Cynicism is a word that’s hard to reconcile with Al Ribskis now -- he describes it as a nagging a sense of pointlessness:  good grades came easy, but he really had no idea what he planned to do with himself.  And in retrospect, maybe his doubts weren’t all wrong.

Al's logo for TECH RacinGraphics drawn by Roger Warrick

When Al was in high school, Don McLean was singing “Bye bye Miss American Pie” almost every time you turned on the radio. America’s long streak of post war prosperity, marked by steady growth, had crested and a long period of disruptions was underway – over the next 20 years they’d rattle every rung on the employment ladder.  If Al had gone ahead and pursued the course he couldn’t quite picture as a 19 year old, he might have been one of those middle managers shrugged loose mid-career by rounds of corporate streamlining.

Instead, he rebelled by leaving college to train as an electronic technician at DeVry.   He found electronics interesting – as a kid he built simple radios and motors from Heath kits -- and when he finished the program in a year and a half he had no trouble rounding up job offers.  Over the years, his skills haven’t exactly protected him from disruptions, but they have helped him pluck opportunities from the flux.

His first job was at JAY Cash Registers, a third generation, family owned business now known, after some adjustments, as JAY Retail Systems.  They started out selling used mechanical registers in the 1920s; by the mid 1950s they could claim to be the world’s largest used cash register dealer.  They also made parts and supplies for reconditioning machines, sometimes through contracts with overseas manufacturers.  Then, in 1973, they introduced the world’s first mass produced electronic cash register – with built in computing power that gave managers quick access to sales data a few key strokes.

Over the next 13 years, the company reports, sales jumped from a few million dollars a year to over $100 million in inflation adjust dollars. They didn’t build the registers themselves, they contracted with Japanese firms to do it.  Stateside, JAY maintained a network of over 600 authorized dealers, supported by hundreds of salesmen and technical support personnel.

Al joined their stable in 1979 in the hubbub of their most prosperous years.  He also married the girl he’d met as at his high school job as an Andy Frain usher at the old Comiskey Park.  They set up house in a cool Lincoln Park apartment; on week-ends they’d go dancing at Club 950, where DJ Joe Bryl was spinning New Wave records – Al runs into Joe in Bridgeport all the time now, some 30 years later, at Maria’s Community Bar or at the Co-Prosperity Sphere.

And one afternoon back in ‘79, driving a Chevy Nova handed down from Al’s brother, they spotted a used MG sports car on a car lot, exchanged looks, and agreed they should buy it.  Al has collected some of the old print ads for that car -- they show young couples posed with the agile little vehicle at picnics, or at the beach, with gliders in the background – they depict a joyful, carefree existence that still reflects how he feels driving that car today.  And the car opened doors to other things.

They say the British MG was the vehicle that introduced Americans to the joys of the sports car. American GIs first saw it during World War II.  After the war, MG only built about 10,000 of its MGTD model, but a couple thousand made their way to US shores – modest numbers, but proportionally significant -- and  in the coming years, Americans would spend more and more time on the road.

The MGA was introduced in 1955 – the year before Congress passed the Federal Highway Act to fund a new Interstate highway system, and the same year Road America opened as the first permanent road race course on the North American continent.  The MGA was designed to make its mark in a growing field of European sports cars angling for a piece of the American market: the Italians would build fancy cars for the rich; MG built a quality sports car affordable to the ordinary driver.  It was the MGB, the car that Al bought, that would really solidify that reputation.  The MGB was introduced in 1962; MG sold 500,000 of them over the next 18 years.

Interesting, for a sports car, it’s unlikely anyone ever bought an MGB for power or speed.  The car had a modest 4 cylinder, 94 horsepower engine, and it didn’t have the comforts considered basic in American cars, like heat, or windows that could be rolled down, or defrosted.  For comparison, Ford introduced its Mustang GT, setting the standard for a whole class of pony cars, in April of 1965.  It had an 8 cylinder, 225 horsepower engine, and Ford sold 417,000 of them before the end of the year.

Still, MG was selling all the cars it could build.  They had a reputation for simple design and quality construction, and they handled well, they were fun to drive.  Al describes their “underdog appeal” in racing terms  - how in a mixed race, the cars with the most powerful engines would pull out on the straightaway, but the small, maneuverable ones could outfox them on the turns.

Over the years, these qualities were partly muffled as the MGB was ‘federalized’ to meet emerging American safety and emission standards.  Raised suspensions made it a little less maneuverable; heavy rubber bumpers altered its looks.  When the 1975 model came out, the modifications strained every system in the engine, reducing it to 63 horsepower and leaving it susceptible to mechanical problems. Al spends a lot of time in the garage, absorbed in loving repairs, but he still describes driving that car as a joyful experience. 

1975-76 turned out to be a record sales year for the MGB, though sales dropped after that, and MG’s problems were compounded by labor disputes, until 1980, when they stopped production.  But their cars still have a strong following today.  There are over a hundred active MG owner’s clubs in the US, whose members can talk shop, source parts, and socialize in rallies and caravans.  Back in 1979, when Al had just bought his MGB, he joined the Chicagoland MG Club and drove in a club caravan to Road America, the historic road race course in Elkhart Lake Wisconsin, over Labor Day.  He was smitten.

Helmet painting for a customer who told Al
"Every day at the racetrack is like having ice cream." 

Within a few years he was attending Skip Barber Racing School, which provides an introduction to the elements of racecraft, from techniques for braking and passing to controlling vehicle drift, and prepares students to qualify for an amateur racing license.  Graduates can race Skip Barber cars with limited damage liability at Skip Barber racing series that cover 30 race courses in Canada and the US.  Soon, Al was racing 2-3 times a year, and occasionally manning flag stations along the race course.

Back at the job, the electronic cash register business was also accelerating.  JAY’s electronic machines had changed the cash register industry; by the mid-80s competitors had entered the field.  Soon, cheaper versions of the “ECR” (electronic cash register) could be had through discount stores, without the benefit of an expensive support staff. 

Al was let go as JAY’s made adjustments, but he was able to pick up a job at a competitor’s shop on the old Northwest Highway.   And bout that time, he happened to see an ad in the Chicago Reader classifieds that would mark a significant turn in his alternate career.  It was listed under “Opportunities,” and it was located just a mile down the highway at Orion Industries, applicators of industrial coatings.  At the time Orion applied Teflon to cookware; now they apply coatings to medical instruments.

Owner Bruce Nesbitt was a savvy businessman.  Nesbitt is also a prime example of a type Al describes with admiration – the wealthy individual whose success in business allows him to buy a race car and try his hand at racing, and whose priorities gradually evolve until he’s building the business to support the racing habit.  Bruce had been racing for 20 years when Al met him.  He’d built a shop out of a corner of the Orion facility where a crew of 4 or 5 guys worked on his Camaro.  

One of them was a paid crew chief, the others were volunteers who worked for the love of the sport. Al started in the summer season as a volunteer mechanic; by winter, Bruce had hired him as crew chief.  The meticulous work suits Al’s skills and proclivities, though the stress of the occasional part failure did not.  Between them the crew might put hundreds of work hours, using endless checklists, into preparing for a 45 minute race.  At high speeds, heat and vibrations would jolt things loose and cause loose parts to fail.  Al vividly remembers one race that Bruce was leading with a real chance to win, until smoke started pouring from the engine and he had to drop out of the race.  A bundle of cables had rattled loose and short circuited as their protective coating wore off.  Bruce took incidents like that with relative equanimity, it was all part of the sport.  But they wore on Al, and by the end of the season he felt he had to resign.

This left him, in 1986, at a loss what to do with himself for the first time since his college days, though he no longer had that cynical streak.  He took a seminar called “Empower Your Career” that he credits with launching him into something entirely new.  He knew he wanted to try his hand as an entrepreneur, by the end of the seminar he had identified opportunity in a new kind of electronic signage with scrolling type.  The signs were made in Japan, but he could source, distribute and install them.  And once he began subscribing to trade publications, it turned out the sign business was in the midst of another transition, in which hand lettered signs were giving way to adhesive vinyls, cut with a computerized plotter.   Al didn’t buy the equipment, he saw opportunity specking and installing them. 

Compared to fast cars, installation of pre-built electronics and adhesive vinyls might sound like dull stuff, but Al, with his meticulous streak, takes great pleasure in the survey work – the measurements and preparations that make the installation go well.  It’s the part of the job he believes others too often neglect.  He might use third party contractors to build an enormous sign cabinet, to operate the crane that hangs it, to shape the neon tubes that light it and cut the vinyl letters that will spell out the menu around the edge of the roof, and if he’s taken an accurate survey, it will also fit together without a hitch.  He describes working atop a ladder – applying lettering or paint or connecting electronics – as peaceful and absorbing, above the hubbub of the street.

For 9 years, Al’s best client was Leona’s restaurants.  The first sign he did for them was a vertical cabinet with Leona’s name spelled in ruby lights – it still hangs along Taylor Street.   When business slowed after the dot-com bust and 9/11, it became clear that his ability to survey a job did not extend to managing cash flow.  In 2002, he closed his business and began to work for other installers, joining the sign installers union in 2007. 

Union work brought him to big jobs at hotels and office buildings where he might mount hundreds of labels at doors and stairwells – jobs that had less to do with orchestrating the details of one big sign than working out the quickest way to mount a dozen in an hour at precisely the same height.  But there too, Al appreciates a sense of landscape: a job in the West Loop puts him in proximity to where a construction boom unfolds, or it might put him in the service of impressive clients.  When one job sent him to work on a Crate and Barrel store, he was delighted at the prospect because he admired the company.

“I was thinking ‘This is great!  I get to work for Crate and Barrel – (founder) Gordon Segal is a retail genius!’”  Then he arrived at the site, and the store manager filled his ear with complaints about shortcuts and unfulfilled promises made by the installation company that had sent him to the job.  Al went home and wrote an earnest letter to the company president, because surely upper management would want to know about the client’s concerns, and he felt let down when he got a letter back, dismissing the client’s claims in soothing terms about how misunderstandings are inevitable in business.

Al’s other career affords more idealistic principles.  In the mid-2000s, a friend invited him to a luncheon with the Chicago Loop Auto Sports Society (CLASS), an informal club of serious enthusiasts who meet monthly at Pazzo’s restaurant to talk about cars and racing.  It was at a CLASS luncheon that Al met David Cooper, whose west loop company Cooper Technica does extravagant restorations of vintage cars.

For photos from the restoration of this Land Rover,
see Cooper Technica's web-page under "For Sale"

For the purist, a vintage car is a pre-war vehicle, built between 1919 and 1939, though Cooper does other restorations, like vintage Land Rovers built between 1950 and the mid 1970s. He searches out devalued specimens in poor condition with uncertain origins, and assembles a pool of investors to buy them, and fund their restoration.

A rare car’s provenance, its origins, ownership and any racing career, can have a dramatic impact on its value.  Cooper takes pride in his skill as a sleuth – he’ll track down heirs, study family photos for images of a favorite vehicle, he’ll press survivors to visualize themselves back inside the car. “You want to turn on the windshield wipers,” the Chicago Tribune once described him pressing the son of a socialite whose famous custom car may have turned up in a collection of packing boxes. “Where do you reach?”  The answer that helped prove he had the right car: the man reached for a switch overhead. 

His shop mechanics will rebuild the car at Cooper Technica’s West Loop garage, which has its own machine shop, sheet metal and paint facilities.  As they do it, they’ll strike a careful balance between preservation and functionality, because when the car is finished, it won’t be a fragile show piece, it will be a real vehicle built to drive.  Cooper Technica boasts that some of its restored cars may be driven every day.  Wherever possible, they’ll use original specifications and period production techniques, authentic right down to the chemistry of the materials.  But they may make discrete modifications in consultation with an owner -- use modern valves or rubber gaskets for instance -- to adapt the car for current fuel and driving conditions. 

For a time, Al had the great pleasure of working at the Cooper Technica shop alongside an older mechanic named Sonny, who drove his own vintage Land Rover.  Al got to fabricate a complete wiring harness for one of the Cooper Technica Land Rovers.  As wires age, their insulation turns brittle and cracks.  Al ran new wire, making fuse boxes and connections to all the switches with careful reference to the original manual, because every detail would be accurate – if the manual called for a particular connection to be made in blue wire, or in brown wire with an orange tracer, he’d reach for one of the spools Cooper Technica kept ready to hand.

He recalls one happy afternoon spent with Sonny, carefully scouring corrosion off the original spoked wheels of a 1930s era Alfa Romeo.  The metal was 70 years old, they knew its metallurgic composition and the city in Italy where it was made, and at one point they looked up at one another and asked “Can you believe we’re working on this?”

For photos from the restoration of this Alfa Romeo,
see Cooper Technica's web-page, under "Past Projects"

Which points toward one of the contradictions of their craft -- because there is fantastic money in it. Vintage cars have been racking up record prices at auctions through 2014, and the most rarefied specimens never make it to auction, they’re usually placed through private brokers and dealers.  They tend to hold their value when stocks and real estate do not.  That means Cooper’s investors might put up hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore a car that will eventually fetch tens of millions.  But the restoration will take thousands of hours, and after it’s finished they may wait years to place it with the buyer prepared to pay its real value.

In the meantime, the restoration itself is done by meticulous, skilled craftsmen who might work for something close to the honor of working on the vehicle.  Al got paid for working at Cooper Technica but eventually, he had to quit because he simply couldn’t afford it.  Sign work pays better and it is his main employment today.

But he remains involved in the Midwest racing circuit, and his racing connections spawned the business that would become TECH RacinGraphics, when his friend Rusty Zimmerman first asked him to decorate his racing helmet in 1999.  It turns out that the paint masking techniques and adhesive vinyls Al uses for sign work also lend themselves to the kind of meticulous detail his helmet customers ask him to produce.

TECH RacinGraphics, might decorate a $1,000 helmet for $600 to $900, depending on the level of detail.  To make the checkered pattern on this helmet Al masked out hundreds of tiny squares.  Customers have occasionally hinted he might charge more, and he admits he finds it hard to set prices, which is one reason he eventually abandoned his business as a full time entrepreneur.  He made a living during a respectable stretch of good years, but his work life has spanned a postmodern period defined by the pressures that acceleration, globalization, and widening disparity of incomes exert on labor and ownership alike.

In some ways those pressures have made work more exciting: Al agrees he’s had opportunity to engage in far wider array of interesting work than he would have in a quiet office or on a factory floor.  In fact, his particular interests in racing and rare cars are fueled by the fortunes of wealthy individuals.  But for Al, there has been a big trade off in basic job security and the absence of a reliable safety net.

On the race course, Al says the most expensive car doesn’t always win the race, but he says the car probably counts for more than half of it.  So it’s partly to keep the sport interesting that the racing community self regulates, subdividing the field into classes, so that cars of an era, or similar horse power, compete against each other, giving the widest possible field of cars a fair opportunity to push their limits at the track.

Short of some real life parallel, there is the satisfaction of finding your niche, and finding it again if you can each time the course changes.  If Al’s not sure how to price his helmet graphics, that’s partly because he’s prone to lose track of time while he’s working on them.  He describes himself at work in his paint booth in the middle of the night -- the work is peaceful, he is fully absorbed.  He refers back to that “Empower Your Career” course he took years ago when he says “Working in that paint booth is exactly the kind of work environment I belong in.”

Al on the F1 podium at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway,
from TECH RacinGraphics web page:
"This is the level of enthusiasm I apply to every helmet I work on."

A New Generation of Live Work Space on Halsted

On the outside, this building looks like a lot of the mystery buildings on Halsted Street, like someone has forgotten they own it, or like they’ve inherited it from their grandparents and they aren’t sure if it’s worth anything yet.

But if Halsted’s other mystery buildings are, in fact, anything like this one, that’s good news for the near term fortunes of the street, because this one has been humming with plans for several years.  Visible progress was slowed by structural problems and hurdles in the Chicago codes, but now they’re cleared, and behind the frontier-town façade the building’s insides are being rapidly rebuilt from the basement floor to the rafters.

When renovations are finished in July, there will be 2 second floor apartments, a maker of traditional Italian sausage in the basement, and a giant live work space on the first floor.

Kevin Sheehan and Bobby Lyons were both born and raised in Bridgeport. So were their parents -- Bobby’s family were cops, Kevin’s were tavern keepers. They have been close friends since grade school, they lived their wild youths together, though they’ve both settled down a lot since then.

A few years ago they started tossing around the idea of buying a building together.  They considered buying a bar out in Mount Greenwood, which seemed like a good source of easy profits, but the potential for easy profit gave way to other considerations, and if this project has one defining characteristic, it is something more like a long term view.

A Sticker Appearing Around Halsted Street

The building they finally bought, in 2011, was the first bar Kevin’s family owned in Bridgeport.  His grandfather’s brother opened it before Prohibition.  It’s across the street from Schaller’s, which holds the oldest active liquor license issued in Chicago, and a few doors south of the 11^th ward office.

Kevin’s father ran his own tavern on Union and 38^th Street, kitty corner to where the Shinnick’s tavern still operates today. Kevin’s cousin Jack Sheehan, who married a Schaller, still operates his tavern near 35^th Street on Halsted – next to the former site of Bridgeport Tattoo, whose owner once talked admiringly about wanting to tie his business in to a traditional neighborhood like Bridgeport, though he’d lived a more itinerate life himself and he’s since shuttered the shop.

One of Kevin’s uncles ran the bar at 3707 S Halsted when Kevin was a kid – he’d lived in the apartment over the bar his entire life.  After he died, the family sold it to Richard Mossman, a bricklayer they knew, who rezoned the parcel to accommodate plans for a lofty 4 story condominium development he hadn’t got around to building before the market crashed in 2006.

By 2011 Mossman had a For Sale sign in the window, and Kevin and Bobby called him up to inquire.  They knew if they bought it they would have to put time and money into it -- the building had settled and shifted over the years, the whole frame tilted to the side.  But it’s in the same corner of Bridgeport where they have anchored their lives, and it has sentimental significance. Kevin’s says his father, who has passed away, had thought about buying it, and he would have been glad to know the old building was back in the family.

Once they owned it, they went back and forth a couple times about how to proceed.  At first they got permits to renovate it, they thought they could take down a couple exterior walls and salvage the others.  For awhile it looked like they might have to tear the whole thing down and start from the ground as a new construction project.  City codes would have required them to move the structure back 15 feet from the sidewalk, and from its original foundation, which they were willing to do, but they needed a new set of permits, and the permit process dragged on through the fall of 2013. 

By December they decided to go ahead with the renovation, which they already had permits for.  They tore the insides out, down to the exterior walls; their contractor looped chains around the top beam in the north wall of the frame, and workers on the ground in the lot just south of the building pulled the whole thing straight with come-alongs.  They nailed in some reinforcing carpentry and let it stand for a month to make sure it stayed straight, then they built the interior framing that will help hold it in place over time.

Meanwhile, one of the most brutal winters in memory blasted the structure with freezes and thaws and eventually caused the foundation, exposed when they took out the floors, to crack. At this point, other investors might have turned, snarling, on each other and sued their contractor; Bobby and Kevin made parallels to the metaphorical significance of building a life on a strong foundation, and their contractor, whom they’ve known for years, proposed to split the cost of the repair.

When it’s all finished, the building will have a pretty new masonry façade facing Halsted Street.  Bobby will move out into one of the apartment on the second floor, and Mike Botica, another friend from the neighborhood, whom they’ve known for years, will rent the basement to make sopressata, a dry cured Italian sausage.

Mike makes sopressata using old family recipes he learned from his wife’s Grandma Theresa.  He says they used to hang their sausage in a spare bedroom, leaving the windows open so it could cure in the cold.  He first started helping out when he and his wife were still dating.  When Grandma Theresa saw he had an interest, she sat him down and taught him her recipe, and handed over her grinder and her press, which he still uses – they’re each over 100 years old.

Right now, Mike makes his sopressata for friends and family as a hobby, but it’s “a hobby on steroids” --- last year he made 1,200 pounds of it in a 3 day operation that brought up to 30 people to his house at a time.  Setting up all the tables and equipment is a project in itself: moving it all out from his garage into the basement at South Halsted will allow him to make the set up permanent, and also to install a walk in cooler and de-humidifier.

Eventually he would like to get all his licensing lined up and open a business – he says he’d try selling it mail order first, and if that goes well, he’d like to open a deli on the first floor of Bobby and Kevin’s building.  It would require changing the zoning back to commercial, but he’s already discussed it with Alderman Balcer, and the Alderman was enthusiastic about the idea.  They both remember a time when South Halsted had more storefronts on it – including Granata’s, next door to the Ramova Theater, which Mike describes as something like Conte di Savoia on Taylor Street, not as large, but very successful.

All that would be several years away, come July, the 1^st floor space will be ready for other uses.  Mike says Kevin and Bobby have chosen an ideal location – with the new homes being built out from Donovan Park on the west, and some of the most stable blocks in Bridgeport to the east.  The Halsted renaissance might seem slower to advance than its residential one, individual investments might take time to mature, but the foundations are good.

On the Industrial Frontier

Ten years ago the little strip of 37^th Street between Morgan and Racine was not broad and smooth and wide open like it is today.

There were more buildings on it -- the Joslyn plant sprawled the whole length of a city block -- and the street itself was narrower.  Its rolling pavement was a ruin of asphalt patches, all broken into potholes and crumbling to gravel, with stretches of the old paving stones showing underneath.  A set of rail tracks ran across it -- they were operational just up to the verge of the street, but the railcars that used it all stopped before crossing.  And somewhere underneath all that ran a very old water main -- it was broken, and it was also legally inaccessible, so it was going to stay broken for awhile.

But my friend John didn’t know that when he bought the three story warehouse at the middle of the street.  He saw industrial heritage and the opportunity to build something new.

  

I’ve told this story before.  At least the practical version, about the progress of a real estate project. About how John bought it, in 2002, with documents in hand from the city, promising to repair that water main, and from the railroad, detailing their plans for re-activating the track where it crossed the street and ran alongside the loading docks at the back of his building.  The rail siding was a feature central to the interest of the drywall distributor who was going to lease the whole first floor, and pay the rents that would help finance John’s plans to subdivide the other stories into small spaces for metal fabricators, makers and artists.

And how, after he bought it, the railroad’s lawyers squashed the idea of a grade level street crossing – too much liability risk (even though the same tracks run through the middle Racine a few blocks away).  And how the city’s plans to repair the water main were stalled by the significant detail that the city didn’t own the street.  The street was still owned by the company that originally developed the Central Manufacturing District, now a huge multinational, whose lawyers had other things to do than manage the sale of a scrap of street in Bridgeport – an inconvenient bit of industrial heritage.  It would take 3 years before they’d complete the sale and another year for the city to repair the main.

And how John still ploughed forward anyway, doing renovations himself like a really ambitious home improvement project, and attracting tenants, even before there was water, and about the cast of characters who passed through that place, from the outlaws who prowled it before he bought it, to the cast of bikers, missionaries, machinists and other curious parties, including myself, who were drawn in by John’s evolving vision for rebuilding something exciting from waste stream recycled materials, and by his skill for telling a really good story.

For a long time it wasn’t clear if he’d be successful.  He has been.  Though it took him 6 years to finish it, and start looking for the next project, which he found in the Stockyards.  He’s pursuing that one gradually too – time allows synergies to develop.

When I first tried to write about John and his building I had a hard time making a coherent story out of it, because by then I’d already spent 3 years down there, shoveling rocks and hauling debris into dumpsters, and listening to John and all the guys who came through to see what kind of progress he was making.  At night I’d pedal north, exhausted and filthy and weirdly satisfied, and the next morning I’d write down everything I could remember because every detail seemed really important.

Partly I liked it just because in my regular life, I worked at a desk and didn’t have a lot of opportunities to operate simple things like pallet jacks – I thought it was absolutely astounding that even a relatively small person could maneuver loads of material, even machine tools weighing thousands of pounds, across floors and around corners with a simple hand operated device.

But I thought it was a story about everything: the ups and downs of industry, the twists and turns of human ambition, man’s strange relationships with the stuff he manages to accumulate in this world.  There was one scene in particular that stands out in my memory -- it reminds me how the building was an opening, or a lens that made things visible that I couldn’t usually see.  It was a Sunday afternoon spent in the basement, it was cold, like it is now, and beautiful.

When John first bought the building, that basement was like a dungeon.  The windows were covered with plywood, its corners and concrete columns were clotted with cobwebs, the floor was covered with sediment that had been left after he’d pumped an inch of standing water off the floor.

Water would continue to seep back in from a phantom building next door.  When the other building was standing, it had shared drain pipes with the Lowe warehouse; after it was gone, water still entered its old pipes and backed up a drain at the bottom of the elevator shaft in John’s building. Eventually, he’d rent office space to the engineering firm that rebuilt the drainage system for the whole district.  In those early years, though, he was pumping the seepage through a hose that carried it up to a set of plastic drums on the first floor where he’d use it to operate a flush toilet.

Meanwhile, water had seeped into the tank of fluid that ran the hydraulic elevator, turning the oil into a greyish foam that spread through the lines and into the piston that raises and lowers the elevator cage.

On this particular afternoon, John was down there in the elevator pit – where everything was covered with a thick coat of slime that stank of mold and motor oil.  He had clamped a floodlight on the elevator door, which opened horizontally like 2 iron jaws, and the muck at the bottom glistened in the light.  He wasn’t intimidated by the fact he’d never fixed an elevator before – he’d basically do it by taking it apart to see what was inside, and he’d do most of it with nothing but a pipe wrench and a big allen key.

The plywood had been pried off the basement windows, and the sun was streaming in overhead.  I was sweeping sediment off the floor.  It filled the air in a sunlit haze, and the otherworldly chords of a Romanian women’s choir filtered through the space.  Every now and then, John’s voice would rise from out of the pit, exclaiming after he’d opened a line and found it was still in excellent condition inside.

And while we were down there, Santa stopped by.  Santa had been proprietor of Scooter World, a business selling used motor cycle parts that had once occupied at least 2 floors of the building, though he’d lost control of his inventory before John arrived on the scene.  He still came around to see what kind of progress John was making.  He knew a lot about the building – what had broken and how they’d fixed it before.  And if John had some scrap he wanted to get rid of, Santa would take it off his hands.

This afternoon, he fell to chatting about how he’d started Scooter World back in the 1960s, when motor scooters were very popular.  He’d started it as a repair shop, and neighborhood kids would hang around the shop and learn how to fix stuff by watching Santa do it.  He says scooters came out in a new model every year, and you could harvest parts from old bikes people would abandon in the alley when they got new ones.

As his inventory grew, he moved from one space to the next, before arriving at the old Lowe warehouse on 37^th Street, where he spread over several floors.  Now Santa looked back with nostalgia on the glory of his inventory, which had whole departments dedicated to seats, or gas tanks or carburetors.  Gesturing around, he described how the basement was filled with wheels from every kind of vehicle, from lawn-mowers to bikes.

Then the guy who owned the building died, and left it to his daughter, and his daughter let her boyfriend Cowboy move in.  Cowboy engaged in a lot of destructive pastimes before he finally went to prison.  Santa said it was for beating an old man to death for the money in his pocket, which turned out to be $37 and change.

But his real complaints about Cowboy came after Santa fell behind in his rent, and Cowboy started selling off his stuff. Because Cowboy didn’t know what anything was worth, or he didn’t care.  He’d sell parts worth hundreds of dollars for a fraction of their value in quick cash.  He’d squandered Santa’s glorious collection, accumulated over decades, it still rankled with Santa now.

After they were both gone, other guys, friends of John’s, would come through that warehouse with new collections.  Their skill sets reflected the era of industry where they’d pursued their careers; it was their collections that reflected what they’d been able to make of it all.  They weren’t accumulations of wealth, in fact they often turned out to be cumbersome objects hung round their owner’s necks, but they were fascinating to look at, to sort through, they seemed to be testament to something – to their owner’s ability to see possibility, though not necessarily their ability to grasp it.

So Santa and Cowboy both came through in the frontier days, the long interim between when the Central Manufacturing District was first built, at the cutting edge of modern industry, and when John arrived a century later to rebuild it for a new industry revival.  In that interim, Cowboy saw a vacuum for a chaotic career on the semi-legal fringe; Santa saw opportunity dealing in other people’s junk, sifting out gradations of value that could only be realized if you were willing to learn what it was all worth to the right buyer.

John’s friend Richard was a machinist.  His employer kept luring him back from retirement because his skill set can’t be hired anymore.  His collections included heaps of stuff you could buy at hardware stores, but also elegant wooden chests filled with antique instruments, sets of drill bits and dies that had been hand tooled, and a growing collection of machine tools he was buying up at fire sales and hauling to John’s building as more and more businesses shut down – some of them still had appendages from when they were hooked up to steam engines.

His friend Matt’s favorite job had been working for a company that made elaborate props – fiberglass trees that were really waitress stations, things like that.  He wanted John to fill the warehouse with craftsmen who could build objects in any material – wood, glass, metal, fiberglass – and he got him started, referring some of his earliest tenants.  Matt’s collections were accordingly eclectic: boxes of glass lenses the size of saucers, a long tray of beads and semi-precious stones, antique furniture he might someday repair and dozens of wood-framed windows he planned to someday build into a greenhouse.  His friendship with John nearly sank under that collection, he underestimated how much time we spent hauling it back and forth across the floors to get at windows John was replacing, or to core holes where he’d run new plumbing stacks through the floors.

John’s era was in high-tech end of industry.  He built virtual sets for industry trade videos using motion tracking technology originally developed for making smart bombs – it’s probably archaic now, it was a little tenuous back then.  You could build any fabulous set you could imagine, but if the tracking mechanisms lost their place the human talent could appear to go skidding across the virtual carpet, or the whole set would shiver behind their backs.  The industry turned out to be tenuous too – the company John worked for spent millions on bleeding-edge technology they were betting would become standard for the industry, and when it did, the price came down and they found themselves competing with guys working out of their basements.  Eventually, the founder would sell his business to a big media company.

But by then John’s building was up and running with water and utilities, and he’d sorted through a whole range of new age, low tech possibilities – the drywall distributor lost interest when the rail siding fell through, but then the Italian cookie company and the green architects considered moving in, and even though they never did, one by one the glass finisher, the metal workers and the artists started renting.  When the building was fully occupied, he moved on to the next one, which he bought a few blocks away.

That afternoon in the cold, in the basement, when John was banging around the elevator shaft, and the women’s voices filtered through the sun-lit haze, while Santa told wild stories of the frontier days, the whole place hummed with possibility.  It was more vivid because it was built from stuff that was workable with simple tools and human sweat, and because it resonated with the efforts and imaginings of all the guys who’d passed through there before, whether they’d been successful for a time or not.

Modern Jazz and New Vision for the Public Library

Frank Chapman has had a long career as a jazz pianist, playing in the be-bop style of Charlie Parker.  He shakes off the suggestion that jazz is for sophisticates, he says be-bop came out of dance halls.  In fact, he learned to play it in jail, where he found himself as a 19 year old, surrounded by older musicians from Saint Louis and Kansas City.  They’d all been locked up for drug charges, not violent crimes; they passed the time playing modern jazz.

For 30 years after that, Chapman played in New York, the nation’s jazz capital, but he has lived in Bridgeport since 2011, and one day soon, he will perform a show at the Richard J. Daley branch of the Chicago Public Library (3400 S. Halsted).  The date has not been nailed down yet, but it will be the next in a series of music shows for adults that Branch Manager Jeremy Kitchen launched last fall.  It grew out of an experiment in programming at the Chicago libraries.

The explosion of the internet has inspired some creative soul searching among librarians in general.  A public repository of books seems less necessary to supporting a literate public, now that the internet gives easy access to oceans of information.  Libraries have found new roles, like providing digital access, and promoting informational literacy – a step beyond the ability to read, informational literacy includes the ability to find what you want from out of the superabundance, to evaluate and use it.  And the physical library is still a great asset.

Recently, researchers at Heidelberg University ranked 31 world class library systems, from Stockholm to Sao Paulo to Singapore, based on features that contribute to the vitality of the Informational City.  The ranking gave equal weight to features of the digital library (like e-documents and digital reference services) and the physical library (particularly its architectural presence, and its spaces for learning, meeting, play and work -- the book collections weren’t one of the factors on the list).

After all, the Information Age has not been built on media alone.  It is said that the advent of the printing press and the wide circulation of new media helped give rise to a new kind of public sphere.  People began to understand themselves to be part of a common conversation -- they might be geographically dispersed and socially stratified, but they were also participants in the ebb and flow of public opinion.  Books, pamphlets and newspapers made that common conversation possible.  But so did the coffeehouses and clubs where they were debated and discussed.

When the Heidelberg researchers ranked world library systems, the Chicago libraries came out first among the cities in the United States, and third in the world, after Vancouver’s and Montreal’s.  Chicago scored slightly better as a physical library than it did on the digital scale.  That’s testament to decades of capital investment.  Mayor Daley’s Library Commissioner, Mary Dempsey, enjoyed overseeing the construction or renovation of 44 libraries in the 75 branch system.

Then Mayor Emanuel came in on a promise to be tough about the budget, and he seemed to see the library as an easy target for cuts.  He first proposed to make half his staffing cuts from library personnel, even though library operations represented just 3% of the city budget.  Commissioner Dempsey resigned.  Emanuel picked an IT executive from the San Francisco library system to replace her.

But Commissioner Brian Bannon has shown no interest in replacing Chicago’s physical libraries with a cheaper collection of e-books. Several of his technology projects make spaces for new patrons, like the YOUMedia Center for teens, and the MakerLab, a temporary skunkworks project that won a Chicago Innovation Award last year.

In fact, Bannon has outsourced a big piece of the library’s IT work, signing a 3 year contract with BiblioCommons to maintain a state of the art digital catalog system.  He told Library Journal that the contract wouldn’t just provide a better catalog, it would cut the need for in house technical expertise so librarians could spend more time curating the collections and engaging the community.

In June, the CPL Foundation won a million dollar grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to try a more innovative way to develop library programs, in partnership with a firm called IDEO, and the Aarhus Library system in Denmark.  Aarhus is a city a tenth the size of Chicago, but it’s known worldwide in library circles for its progressive programs.  IDEO is a high profile innovation consultancy known for its “design thinking” approach.

Design thinking explores what people want, and how they actually use things, and proceeds by trial and error: you don’t spend months analyzing a problem and drafting an ideal solution, you start by brainstorming a bunch of ideas, trying them out, discarding the ones that don’t work without wasting too much time on them, and building on the ones that do.

Jeremy Kitchen has been particularly active with the library’s experimental programs.  He served as children’s librarian at the Richard J. Daley Branch in Bridgeport for 7 years; he was promoted to Branch Manager shortly before Commissioner Bannon was hired in early 2012.  Last summer, Kitchen was part of a team who traveled to a library conference in Aarhus, and got a glimpse of the Danish model firsthand.  Some of Aarhus’ innovations deploy digital technology in new ways.  But Kitchen says what struck him most was the role the libraries played as community space.

The Danes stood back to reassess the purpose of their libraries too, back in 2010, which was also a time of budget cutbacks.  They determined they wanted their libraries to cultivate a society of innovation to further Denmark’s globalization goals.  Libraries would be places of learning, but also places of creative inspiration, fueled by participation in arts and performance, and just by putting patrons into contact with other people who might have different tastes and opinions than their own.

Under the Gates Foundation grant, the Chicago libraries tried 3 prototype projects with broadly similar aims.  Kitchen organized one of them at the Daley Branch in collaboration with the Valentine Boys and Girls Club: it was a sort of creative projects fair for teens.  The library auditorium was set up with stations where the kids could try different activities.  Some involved technology – like a station with musical instruments and music apps that are available free on the internet.  Kitchen says the most popular stations were analog – like the electric typewriter with a long scroll of paper in it, where people could add a sentence or two on an Exquisite Corpse style narrative.

Since then, Kitchen and the team have continued to take the design thinking model on the road, trying out projects at branch libraries in other neighborhoods.  In one of them, a group of teenage boys took selfies.  That was at Legler Library in West Garfield Park - one of the city’s grandest regional libraries at the center of one of its most dangerous neighborhoods.  The teens were all tattooed.  So is Kitchen -- his forearms are covered with colorful kid-friendly designs from his days as a children’s librarian, including a gentle looking giraffe, and a unicorn with a balloon.  They ended up trading stories and documenting their tattoos.

Though “documenting” suggests a structured purpose, Kitchen emphasizes the project was deliberately unstructured because the point is not to recreate an instructional environment like school.  The point is to engage the kids in a project they want to do, to encourage them to see the library as a resource they want to use, even as a safe place to hang out.

Kitchen, who was once a social worker, says the young men who came in for the project don’t have a safe place to hang out – they’re immersed in an environment where one bad decision, their own or someone else’s, could change their lives at any time.  His description of the way their surroundings limit their lives hints at the value the library could have if it could open a sense of access to a broader sphere.

Media alone doesn’t do that – the kids already have access to media.  Last summer Wired magazine published a feature about how social media helps inflame gang violence in Chicago neighborhoods, it can just tie people in to a vicious feedback loop.  We all need some sense of a larger world, a sphere of possibility that extends beyond the place we’re standing at any given moment.  The Danish model of the physical library as an inspirational space seems to aim for something like that.

Back at the Daley Branch, Kitchen says the idea to open the auditorium as a neighborhood performance space was directly inspired by his visit to Aarhus.  The music shows aren’t curated performances that the public ought to hear; they are an opportunity for a creative neighborhood exchange.  The first show, in October was by Fast Decay, a punk band from Back of the Yards.  Kitchen says 50-60 people attended, including small children and senior adults – many of whom would probably never hear punk rock in its usual habitats.

Next, you’ll have the opportunity to hear Frank Chapman perform modern jazz.  It sounds like a promising show, whether you’re already a jazz fan, or just open to hearing something new.

Making the Neighborhood Safe to Cure Meat

In the coming weeks, the garages and cold basements of Bridgeport will be hung with sopressata.  Hundreds, even thousands of pounds of it will dry cure in cold air in an age old preservation technique.  And as it cures, John Schultz will re-calculate the future of Mr. Spanky’s, his restaurant at Shields and 31^st Street, where he’s been selling dry cured bacon from locally raised hogs for just over a year.

A few months ago, the bacon business was so good Schultz was looking for ways to expand production and sell through other outlets, but he was challenged by a regulatory environment geared for the mass production of big food.   Now he’s shuttered the restaurant for the season, and is just running his catering business, which delivers fresh salads under the name Foodism Chicago.

If you miss Mr Spanky’s well cured pork, you can taste it again downtown, where he’ll be selling pork buns, bacon and breakfast sausage at The Nosh, a roving Chicago food market designed to promote small batch, artisanal food.  The Nosh will be held at Block 37 every Thursday and Friday in February and March.

Schultz knows his career is in wholesome local foods, but he is still exploring the best way to make it a business that supports a sustainable life.  He grew up in a restaurant family in Joliet, and he crossed the country as chef for the Ringling Brother’s Circus.  He first opened his catering company at 335 West 31^st Street 9 years ago.

About 5 years ago, he started making bacon from his house.  He could accommodate up to 100 pounds of meat a week there, which dried down to 50 pounds of finished bacon.  At first he was selling it at farmer’s markets on Saturdays and Sundays, but before long he was selling all 50 pounds at one market.  It was either scale back to fewer markets, or scale up with more meat.

Through connections of a former employer, he gained access to the banquet kitchen of the Irish American Cultural Center, where he was working with 400 – 500 pounds of meat a week.  He says he could take in 1,000 pounds a week in the space he has at Mr. Spanky’s, if he took out a wall and had a bigger cooler.  But space and a willing customer base aren’t the only considerations.

Spanky’s has been making bacon as a restaurant, which allows Schultz to sell food he makes directly to the end consumer.  In order to sell it through someone else, through another restaurant or a grocery store for instance, he would have to be licensed as a processor by the Illinois Department of Agriculture.  The State says it tries to be flexible, it looks for end results, like the washability of surfaces, the smooth flow of product, water, and air through the facility, but Schultz says that would still translate into rules about the size of his drains and the material on his floors, and he’d have to develop a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP) plan – a test-validated manual of sanitary practice specific to his facility that can cost $10s of thousands to create.

Schultz looked at hiring someone else who had already obtained licensing to process his meat.  He says there are 3 or 4 processors in Illinois who share his interest in sustainable food and do the kind of dry curing he’d like them to do, but they are at capacity making their own product.  In the end he found a family owned enterprise that has been curing bacon with traditional techniques for generations, and will use his recipes to prepare his product – but he had to go to Kentucky to find them.

He still gets his pork from a small Illinois farm.  He has developed a relationship with his farmer, so he can buy just the parts he wants.  He says it took him 5 years to get there, for the first 4 years he had to buy the whole hog, or a whole side of a hog.  He’d make bacon from the bellies, and make a lot of sausage from the rest.  He suspects that effectively caps the market for local, sustainably raised meat into the future - most people don’t have the freezer capacity to buy a whole animal at a time, they need a middle man to cut up the carcass and distribute the parts.

Schultz’s experience pretty much sums up what people mean when they talk about building an infrastructure, not just a market, for sustainable local food.  In Chicago, that agenda will be advanced a little further at the Good Food Festival and Conference, which will convene at the UIC Forum March 13^th- 16^th.  Now in its 10^th year, the Conference aims to build the unromantic but necessary structures to support growing demand for sustainably produced local foods: making connections between investors and small food business, building wholesale distribution chains to bring local food to market, and advocating revisions to a regulatory structure built to supervise mass production, so that it can monitor small producers effectively, without squashing them.

A couple years ago, participants on a panel of farmers and marketing companies that sell locally raised meat all seemed to agree that the biggest brake on the growth of the market for their product was a bottleneck in the processing and distribution parts of the chain.  Those middle segments have been emerging.  In Chicago, a handful of small butcher shops have been joined by Red Meat Market, an online hub where meat buyers and end consumers can source local, sustainable meat.

On-line and off-line forums buzz about how web based marketing can be supplemented by a network of meat hubs that would aggregate product, and facilitate its travel between producers, processors, distributors and buyers in real space.  For that network is to continue to grow, regulators will have to allow it.  There is some disagreement about what, if any, special considerations that would require.

For instance, people have been curing meat with salt and dry air for hundreds, even thousands of years.  Residents of Bridgeport seem to consume great quantities of home cured sausage without getting sick.  But that doesn’t mean salt curing can’t go wrong.  Salt slows the growth of bacteria by taking water out of the meat.  But some pathogens are salt tolerant, and salt levels in the product must be sufficient to stop bacteria growth.

Few would argue they don’t want the food they buy from someone else to be monitored at all.  According to Food Safety News, makers of cured meats should monitor pH levels, water activity, and the potential for cross contamination between foods in a kitchen.  But do they need a fully validated HACCP plan?  When Madison, Wisconsin based Underground Meats launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to create a HACCP plan for making dry cured salami, they estimated it would cost $40,000.

Link to Underground Meats' on Kickstarter Campaign

Underground Meats developed their first HACCP plan with help from food scientists at Madison based Oscar Mayer.  They launched their Kickstarter campaign in September to develop an open sourced plan that could serve as a template for other small salami makers.  HACCP plans must be specific to each operation, they can’t be borrowed wholesale, even by makers of the same product.

But as Underground Meats told Food Tech Connect -- big producers regularly share their HACCP information, it’s the smaller ones that keep their plans proprietary because of the disproportionate expense. Underground Meats hopes its open source plan will level the playing field for small operations, and build community among producers and farms.

As that community grows, leveling the playing field may mean more hybrid enterprise, combining the functions of a restaurant and processor like Mr. Spanky’s has hoped to do, for instance.  It might also pave the way for some of Bridgeport’s sopressata to make its way out from the garage.

A Digression, On How I Got Here

Over Thanksgiving, I saw my friends Paul and Lisa, who are rebuilding a brick cottage they bought out in Garfield Park a couple years ago.  Real Estate is an awful lot cheaper out there.  Paul bought the cottage for $25,000.  He's spent evenings and week-ends since he bought it straightening out one of the exterior walls and building the inside back in.  In the meantime, he's picked up some other properties as opportunities present themselves, including the vacant lot next door to this cottage, and a 2 flat on the next block – most recently he bought himself a car wash.

Back before the crash, our mutual friend TC bought a graystone a few blocks away from where Paul's buying now.  He got jumped twice while living over there, and took to carrying a knife and a bottle of bear mace.  Paul, who rented a room from him for the better part of a year before moving to a live-work studio with Lisa, says TC's graystone was in a different situation.  There was a scrap metal dealer behind it, and a heroin dealer with political connections installed in the house at the end of the block.  Junkies would haul scrap to the metal dealer for cash and stroll by on their way to the drug dealer's house.

Paul's new 2 flat has an open air drug market out front, and the previous owner cut a trap door into the front porch to discourage scavengers and squatters from trying to break in.  But Paul says if you approach from the alley, which is still paved in Belgian block, it looks quaint; he says this part of the neighborhood is relatively safe. 

The drug market is a drive through operation, and the dealers operate as quietly as they can.  There was a shooting incident last year, but that was over a dice game in front of the corner store.  Someone lost a lot of money and the other players were making fun of him, so he got a gun and shot 6 of them.  There were no fatalities.  Since everyone knew who the gunman was the police scooped him up pretty quickly.

But for the most part, Paul says his neighbors are all quiet homeowners, many of them elderly people who bought their houses when the neighborhood first turned black.  They greet Paul and Lisa by name when they see them on the street.  Now, he sees other young professionals who can't afford to buy in places like Bucktown and Logan Square buying cheap property on the Garfield Park frontier.

Paul’s efforts to establish himself out there got me thinking about the urban frontier, and the nature of the opportunities out there.  And even though I don’t live on the frontier by any definition, it reminded me of how I got here myself.

I first moved to Chicago in 1990 – a year that would seem significant later, in terms of the urban frontier.  Superficially though, I was preoccupied with an entirely different set of issues at the time. I came to attend divinity school, to study early Christian history.  I had big ideas about what that would entail.  I imagined it would mean tracing out patterns in the expression of human consciousness. 

The Hellenistic era, when Christianity emerged, was a time of exceptional religious ferment, and of tectonic shifts in people’s sense of where they stood in the world.  At least 20^th century scholars often described it that way.  They saw parallels to tectonic shifts they’d witnessed themselves.

They would say the world had been a smaller place before the Hellenistic era.  In the ancient world, the earth had been a finite plane.  The heavens stretched over it like a dome, encircling its horizons.  Within that enclosure, people had a clear sense where they were, they were generally confident they were standing at the center of the world.

Each particular society exerted more influence over its members under the old world order, because they lived their entire lives without leaving it.  Their religious experience was more socially defined too, expressed in collective rituals more than in personal pieties.  So much so that individuals didn’t need to believe their own souls were immortal.  After death they might pass to some shadowy underworld where they’d chatter in the darkness like flocks of bats, seething in a cave.  But overhead, under the sun, their gods guaranteed the lasting welfare of the society where they had lived their lives.

Alexander’s armies rattled their confidence in these things.  Or the empires that followed would do it, because there had been conquests before.  The armies proved their gods weren’t all powerful, but the Greek and Roman empires unified vast territories under a common administration of law, and taxation, run by an elite who all spoke Greek, and circulated from one city to the next.  These things supported a more cosmopolitan culture than the world had seen before.  Travel was made easier, trade flourished and communication flowed more freely.

Globalization was stimulating, but it was also unsettling.  It was hard to claim you were established at the center of the world from out in the provinces of someone else’s empire.  And the terrestrial dislocations were magnified by astrological ones.  The heavenly dome broke open, people came to understand the position of the earth within a much larger construction of planets and stars, moving overhead in ascending spheres.   The atmosphere below the moon had been shown to be more unreliable, the pull of the planets seemed more complex and sinister, the brilliant realm of the stars much further away.

People’s minds were altered, and they flocked to new forms of religion to orient themselves.  Cults promising personal transformation, sometimes even immortality, spread like nervous energy among  people dislodged from the safety of their enclosed societies.

I first heard all this from a professor named David Ulansey – I remember him as a trim man with a tonsure of dark hair and expressive eyes who dressed in the same neat uniform every day: blue oxford shirt and a tie, with dark blue pants.  He had just made his reputation piecing together a credible account of the Mithraic mystery cult.

The Hellenistic mystery cults promised salvation by initiation into transformative secrets, many of which have been lost to history.  But the cult of Mithras left subterranean sanctuaries across the frontiers of the Roman Empire, preserving the cult’s distinctive iconography.  The central image inside those sanctuaries was the “tauroctony,” or bull slaying, in which Mithras stands over a bull, stabbing it in the neck with a dagger.

Ulansey had come to the conclusion that the tauroctony represented an astral phenomenon called the precession of the equinoxes, which had been discovered by a Greek astronomer not long before the Mithraic cult first appeared.  He described this answer unfolding itself gradually, yielding to years of careful research, with all the small details falling into place around this central connection.  The strength of this Ulansey's argument was not just in his command of the historical particulars, but the imaginative charge of the whole thing: you could believe that ancient discovery had transformative power.

Hellenistic people, uneasy in their new universe, were drawn to astral cults that promised to teach the secrets their souls would need to pass through the heavens, shedding layers of their mortal flaws, and slipping out from the demonic powers that rule the earth to contemplate perfection from among the stars.  The discovery that the equinoxes change would have rattled the whole thing: it meant that the realm of the fixed stars is not really fixed; it meant the whole cosmic structure moved in a new direction, motivated by a previously unknown force.  In secret initiations conducted underground, Ulansey argued, that force was revealed as Mithras, Kosmokrator.

Years later, I’d learn that Ulansey had wandered off from academia not too long after his book on the Mithraic Mysteries came out. He would write that he had fallen into a depression, because all his most compelling ideas were dismissed as too speculative by his academic peers.  So he moved to California where he teaches courses in cosmology and consciousness at an Institute of Integral Studies.

The ancient dislocations he described still remind me what Chicago seemed like when I first moved here -- vast and unnavigable.  The effect was probably magnified by the hour when I arrived, because the city’s population was still waning, its traditional economy contracting, its neighborhoods going back to prairie in spreading patches.  Especially its south side neighborhoods and the west side ones – preparing for new waves of opportunity, it turns out.  But back then, no one knew for sure that the people would come back, not in 1990, when the murder tally was approaching 1,000 a year and the population kept dropping every time the census came in.

I’d moved to Hyde Park, a leafy academic enclave that was surrounded by acres of decimated ghetto we were sometimes warned to avoid, at least until we got our bearings.  But it wasn’t just the poverty close by that was unnerving, I thought it was the novelty of the streetscape.  Compared to the quaint, crooked little city I’d just come from, Chicago was relentlessly rectilinear, the ground was flat, the buildings were plain brick boxes, almost without ornament, the streets laid out on a grid.  As you learn it, it resolves into neighborhoods, each one distinct from the others.  But on arrival, it looked like mile upon mile of the same sort of thing.

I remember thinking it was more profane than where I’d come from.  It was a term I’d learned from History of Religions. The opposite of “the sacred,” as used to great effect by a Romanian scholar who had made the Chicago school of History of Religions famous.  The Romanian's name was Mircea Eliade.  He had just died, 4 years before I got to Chicago, and the fact he was Romanian was turning out to be important.

At the time though, what impressed me was his Homo Religiosus, a distant cousin of Modern Man.  Religious Man craves reality: he wants to center his life around it, participate in it.  But he is painfully aware most of the world is not real in any navigable sense.  Time plods senselessly forward, wearing him out; the landscape spreads out in all directions, a wilderness, indifferent, uninhabitable.

But on occasion, reality boils up in the desert.  Eliade called it heirophany, the appearance of the sacred, the eruption of something vivid and real from out of the vast profane.  To Religious Man, it seems that place is the center of the world, the point of the cosmic axis that connects earth with heaven.  He’ll build his home at that place, or he’ll establish a temple, or found a city.  Build a wall around it.  Outside, the world dissolves into incoherence.

One example Eliade used to illustrate the orienting power of heirophany was a sad tale about the Achilpa people, a nomadic clan of the Australian outback.  The Achilpa did not settle in one sacred place and call it the center, they carried their cosmic axis with them in the form of a tall pole, made from the wood of a gum tree. As long as they had it, they could always communicate with heaven and re-establish themselves.  But then the pole was broken in a tragic accident.  Disoriented, no doubt despairing, the entire troupe simply lay down and waited for death to overtake them.

Homo Religiosus experienced time differently from modern people too.  Eliade claimed that all religious rituals repeat some original act of creation.  And they are not just a sentimental memory of the event, they effectively re-enact it, canceling the damage done by time, and restoring the world to its original condition.  He’d write about the “terror of history” and wonder how humanity has been able to tolerate it.  Modern Man chases after history, trying to make his mark. Homo Religiosus obliterates it over and over again, in an eternal return to the time of creation.

As a Romanian, Eliade had been born in a small country on the eastern frontier of Europe, on the crossroads of empires.  Through the centuries, it had been overrun by the Romans, the Huns, the Franks, the Ottoman Turks.  Eliade was born in 1907, his father and his uncles were military men who fought in the First World War, when Romania was a battleground for larger powers once again.  At the end of it though, Romania came out reunited with contested territories, and with a new sense of national purpose.

Eliade believed his generation had an important destiny: they would define a distinctly Romanian culture, one that could take its place on the world stage.  He believed Romania’s great cultural disadvantage had been that it could not boast a medieval history.  The great Western nations could all do that, but only because they’d been lucky to have a handful of literate men who’d recorded it.  On the other hand, if Romania didn’t have a written history, it had something more fundamental, it had a proto-history, preserved in the oral traditions of its folklore, the myths and symbols of the Romanian peasantry, much of it reflecting their immersion in the rhythms of nature.

Eliade spent the Second World War in Western Europe, serving in posts with the Romanian embassy, first in London, then in Lisbon.  His diaries from Lisbon describe his despair as Soviet troupes encircled the Romanian army at the Battle of Stalingrad.  He lamented the short sightedness of Westerners who cheered for the defeat of the Germans -- he thought they were naïve about the Stalinist Soviets, he thought the Nazi army was defending the West against the modern day Turks, the Asian hordes that had crossed Romania and menaced Europe before.

Eliade came out of the Second World War with a more radical cultural project than when he went in.  He saw that his destiny was not in Romania, championing the particular heritage of the Romanian peasantry, but in the west, where he would look for universal patterns in religious experience that were common to all humanity, at least before the corruptions of modernity.  And he realized that destiny.  He became an academic superstar, his Homo Religiosus defined the field of History of Religions for decades after the war.

Even as Eliade’s international stature grew, other post-war scholars, trying to understand how Nazism exerted such appeal, would point to a German cultural project not unlike his proto-history.  It valorized an indigenous culture of the German peasant, still retrievable through folklore, a culture that reflected their genetic connection to the native landscape. The project comforted a populace left disoriented in a rapidly urbanizing, industrializing society, giving them a venerable folk tradition to grasp hold of.  The Germans also used it to summon up a common ethnic identity to unify the fractured German states into a single nation, an ethnic identity that would later be taken to sinister extremes.

Eliade died in 1986.  When I moved to Chicago in 1990, his intellectual heirs were taking him down from his pedestal.  His Lisbon diaries hadn't been found yet, but people were asking questions about what Eliade had been up to in Romania between the wars.  They wanted to know about his relationship with the fascist Iron Guard – did they just share a romantic view of Romanian peasant and his native culture, or did they share more than that?  And if Eliade was a fascist, maybe Homo Religiosus was susceptible to fascist ideology in some fundamental sense.

A lot of it sounded like guilt by association and subtle attacks by innuendo.  But there were complaints about his method, too.  They’d say in his search for sweeping patterns he’d played loose with the particulars.  The Achilpa didn’t really lie down to die because when their sacred pole broke, they’d lost congress with heaven and could not navigate the world.  A closer reading of the source material makes it sound like they died from embarrassment when they came to a meeting place and their pole was shorter than those of all the other clans.

The context was clarified by JZ Smith, one of Eliade’s Chicago colleagues, who had found that the original story about the Achilpa with the broken pole was not about the importance of establishing a cosmic “center,” or an axis to communicate with heaven.  It was a story about maintaining a connection with ancestors whose travels had marked the landscape.  But it was still a story about making the world navigable, by making it a coherent, meaningful place.

Other critics would make more radical critiques of the way Eliade privileged myth and symbol over collective ritual practice -- the individual’s quest for meaning over religion’s more social functions.  Some would question whether religion constitutes a real category outside of the experience of Western scholars who invented the field.

I wandered off from divinity school 20 years ago, but I still find myself going back every few years to read a little Eliade, and to see what his critics have to say.  Because whatever his failings as a historic portrait, Eliade's Homo Religiosus still carries an imaginative charge.  Not that the particular ways he's said to have oriented himself sound entirely credible, or appealing.  But as a mirror image of Modern Man, who is still out wandering the landscape without a cosmic pole.

Homo Saecularis still craves reality, or at least he’s always talking about it.  It’s just that he seems to pursue it by chasing whatever’s new in the world, and scrambling for the peripheries.  He’d like nothing more than to live in history, even as it accelerates, making his chances of making a lasting impression on it slimmer every year.  So he climbs Everest and treks the desert, he seeks out the remotest societies he can find, looking for a native culture that’s still authentic, or trying to jar himself out of his comfort zone.

At least, those experiences are often glorified in lifestyle magazines.  They may not be the way most people really live their lives.

Years ago, as a student in Ulansey’s class, I wrote a term paper comparing Eliade’s Religious Man, who clings to the center, with Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay about the significance of the American Frontier.  I remember that paper as an embarrassing lament about how Modern Man's restless pursuit of new frontiers shows our unabashed thirst for the profane.

I wouldn't describe it that way now.  Twenty years on, the Frontier doesn't look so much like the opposite of Eliade's center, it's more like it's image in the mirror. For one thing, it's turned out to be eternally recurring.  For another, it still promises to connect us with an experience that’s vital and real.

In 1893 when Turner wrote his essay, the US census had just declared it could no longer identify a frontier line, marked by a certain population density on the edge of settled territory, and would no longer include the “frontier settlement” as a category in its reports.

For Turner, this was a historic moment of great significance.  Up to that point, it was the frontier that had given rise to the culture and institutions that have made us distinctly American.  It did this partly because it offered distance from the Old World, freedom from old customs, laws and institutions.  And partly because the encounter with the Savage exerted a stimulating influence that spurred the creation of new ones.  The frontier fed our vital forces, as the landscape and the cycles of nature were said to feed the vital folk cultures of Europe.

Or, as Turner had concluded, “What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities...” so the Western Frontier had been to the Americans.  “And now, 4 centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”  Except that now, a hundred years after the Western Frontier was closed, we are still establishing new ones.

Paul and Lisa do not describe themselves as frontiersmen out in Garfield Park.  In fact, applying the word "frontier" to Garfield Park brings out insulting connotations.  It evokes old tropes of civilization evolving from an encounter with savagery, it insults their neighbors who have made homes in their neighborhood for decades, it dismisses the ways cycles of disinvestment that create frontier opportunities also blight whole generations of human lives.

In materialist terms, the frontiersman is an opportunist. And staking out the next urban frontier in an undervalued neighborhood is undoubtedly a way to build wealth, and even establish your position in society.

But materialist terms don't exhaust the Frontier's significance.  In romantic terms, it evokes a certain tension between vital energies and the way the world is always threatening to dissolve into incoherence.  It's easy to think that's a threat particular to the modern world, which gets faster and more complex and trickier to navigate every day. But it might be that people have always felt it. That before you can live, you have to establish a foothold, a place to stand and orient yourself and make sense of the world. Whether you do that on some new, vital frontier, or in a place like Bridgeport, someplace more like the center of the world.