keepin it "Real"

Chicago is many things. It is the barbecue capital of the North (you absolutely will NOT find better ribs anywhere outside of the South or Texas, I promise), due to the fact that it's possibly the most soulful city beyond friendly Southern confines. It is these things, but it was never Sexy. Currently, the good people of the City Windy seem to be in overdrive, trying to right this apparent wrong. The times they're changing, and it's all quite entertaining to watch.

Coming in August: Coffee bars, wilderness hikes plus the news from the new Hong Kong.

CHICAGO -- What could be more All-American than celebrating the Fourth in the Midwest? Not much.

However, Chicago is not really the Midwest – I used to think so, when I lived there. Because when I moved in sometime ‘round mid-1995, things were pretty midwestern, and Chicago could sometimes appear more cornfield than world-class metropolis.

That was then, this is now. Where McDonalds once stood, there’s a Tiffany’s, with a Peninsula Hotel upstairs, the same hotel that’s considered top-tier in any city it lands. There’s a Nordstrom in place of an aging office building, and parking garages for something dubious called Disney Quest where old townhomes once stood in the River North neighborhood.

And dem's just the highlights – in the outlands where the real people live, things are changing faster than you’d think in a town that likes to stand still a lot. The Hispanic population (almost exclusively Mexican) has grown 40% since the last census, to comprise 25% of the city that was more Black/Polish than anything else for years.

As I’ve mentioned so many times before, there’s a Starbucks in the old neighborhood where a vacant storefront once stood, on the corner of Magnolia and Wilson – now there’s even more, on the dusty north side strip of Bryn Mawr, in the ground floor of an old flophouse that’s been most artfully redone, making it one of the only new apartment complexes in the city that actually has any character.

Down Cabrini Green way, the towers are finally gone, and more townhouses have gone up than any city could possibly need – on once scary Sedgwick, you can now pay $150 for sushi, saki and fish so fresh they kill it on your plate (literally) at Heat, the city’s hottest new restaurant, suddenly everyone wants in on a block that most people wanted nothing to do with back in the day. I did, because back when I was poorer than I am now, my health clinic was down the end on even scarier Clybourn, where there's now a gourmet grocery store and (boy this is getting tired) a Starbucks.

That’s right – everywhere you look everything is changing -- including the corner of Montrose and Broadway back in Uptown, which back in the day was slated to be converted from a vacant lot into an Auto Zone parts store, but is now ready for groundbreaking on the Buena Pointe Condominiums which will offer $500,000 penthouse views of the supermarket parking lot across the street, which has gone from slum outpost to shiny new suburban-style shopping experience, complete with a bank and (Jesus God!) another Starbucks.

Our little Chicago – all grown up – finally, after the rest of the country is finally settling down, Chicago discovers gentrification and embraces it with the strength of twelve Italian nonnas.

It was one hell of a weekend, with dinner at Tom Boy, a lesbian-owned bistro on North Clark Street in Andersonville, which used to be a dowdy old neighborhood that hadn’t changed much since the Scandinavians moved in decades ago. It’s now become the antidote to North Halsted, which has long been the heart of gay culture in the Midwest, just a mile or two to the south. Like in Los Angeles with Silver Lake, or in New York with Park Slope, Andersonville has become the sort of place where gays and lesbians who don’t like the ‘scene’ flee to for a more pastoral, less body-worshipping type of atmosphere.

Post-ahi-tuna-with-wasabi-mashed-potatoes-and-bottle-of-Pouilly-Fuisse, we traded the casually hip scene of Andersonville for the ever intensifying scene to the southwest in Wicker Park, which has finally been recognized across the country for what it is – the hippest spot (easily, no contest) between the coasts. Nigerian clothing designers and wannabe models from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are all equally at home in the neighborhood that’s part hip, part old world Polish and more than ever, part Mexican.

It’s a radical mix that has left no small amount of carnage in it’s wake – where the Busy Bee, a polish coffee shop once stood is some pointless hipster outlet, where Urbis Orbis once reigned as the best damn coffee house on the Planet, some dubious new yuppie store has moved in. And across the street, MTV’s latest stop on the never ending “Real World” circuit, or should I say circus.

Seems the neighborhood isn’t quite as gentrified as the Viacom people thought it was – the other night, two people were shot in a parking lot just around the corner on Milwaukee Avenue, one of the triad of avenues that comprises the North-Damen-Milwaukee corner that is Wicker Park. One of the wounded dead, the other critical.

So predictably, the Chicago Sun-Times found a great story to run with, “A Little Too Much Real in the Real World,” or something like that. MTV threatened to cut off access to cast members once the show is aired, or something like that. The Sun-Times laughed. Fuck you, they said (in so many words), and Frank Brown, a columnist for the ever more tabloidy rag printed directions to the house the next day.

1931 W. North Avenue, right across from the fallen Urbis Orbis, where I spent no small amount of time back in the day, as it was one of the few spots open after 10 PM in the City that Sleeps A Great Deal.

It’s good to know that Chicago hasn’t lost it’s fight, and it’s good that the World out there is still plenty Real. Although the boutique hotels on State Street where Payless Shoes once kept the watch are a little disconcerting. All the same, it’s nice for Chicago to finally get the respect it deserved all along. Now that there’s a Le Meridien, a W Hotel and a Peninsula, maybe the Coast-based elite will finally decide to pay a visit.

Don’t choke on the ribs at Robinson’s, and don’t get gunned down on your way to that after-hours party in Wicker Park. And hell, enjoy the view from the west-facing rooms at the Peninsula. You can look down on the block between Rush and State – it’s a beauty, to be sure. Convenience stores, McDonald’s, Check Cashing and Dunkin Donuts, a block that’s somehow always been a fabulous catchall of street-types and up-to-no-gooders.

It’s a mess, and Da Mare (Daley) is probably shvitzing over the fact that it hasn’t been bulldozed in favor of condos, but hey – you can’t pave over Paradise in a day.

Thank God.