I have this verbal tic that annoys the shit out of my boyfriend. When I’m headed to Chicago—to visit family, to bury family—I’ll tell people I’m “going home.”
I’ll skirt the edges of the old neighborhood. I’ll visit the big antique mall in an old Jewel grocery store on Broadway, or go slumming at the Granville Anvil, or head to Hollywood Beach. But I honestly can’t remember the last time I made it into the heart of my old neighborhood, the last time I got off the train at the Morse el stop, or rode the Clark Street bus further north than Foster.
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The truest part of Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” isn’t the Hog Butcher and Tool Maker and Stacker of Wheat stuff, or the personification of the city as a “tall bold slugger.” No, the line that captures the essence of living in Chicago, especially the experience of a single neighborhood over time, is, “building, breaking, rebuilding.” If you stay in one place long enough, you will see your city built, broken, and rebuilt.
The Granada and its many storefronts are long gone. Not replaced by a vacant lot—that’d almost be a blessing. Instead, they were supplanted by a bland concrete high-rise, built by Loyola and a Chicago developer, as devoid of personality as a department store mannequin. The rich array of sustenance once available has been reduced to a single sad Subway. In the grand tradition of suburbs, subdivisions, or malls named after the landscapes obliterated in their construction—Deerfield, High Meadow, Old Orchard—the developers called it Granada Center. Loyola eventually turned the building into a dorm.
