As I write this, our train is approaching a spot on the Connecticut coastline due south of Norwalk, Weston, and Ridgefield. These are places where I worked and lived after leaving Chicago 24 years ago. As already noted, Chicago was a very different place a quarter of a century ago. The south side was a ghetto and the west side was a post-industrial wasteland. While it was easy to see the pod of north side skyscrapers, the changes on the west side were less apparent for two reasons. One is that we never ventured to the west side because there was nothing there. The second is that the Empire Builder was first hemmed off by walls and buildings before plunging into the underground railhead that starts where the Chicago river turns from north to east bound.
My eastbound schedule allowed me 6 hours to roam around my old downtown home. First I had to unburden myself of the 60-70 lbs of gear I was lugging around. The train conductor had already confirmed the existence of new post-911 lockers at Union Station. He warned they were “a little pricey”. Boy was that an understatement. Gone are the days of quarters in coin slots. Each locker is big enough for two of those house-moving monster bags tourists are using this days. Access to a locker requires a roll of bills or a credit card and having your fingerprint recorded by on of the 3 kiosks serving the entire wall. Whether this device checks a national fingerprint database or not is unclear. Recovering your stuff requires a six digit code, a matching fingerprint, and $4 per hour up to $12 per day. Wow. In the end, it was well worth $12 for a few hours of freedom.
Ascending into the daylight through the old grand lobby on the west of Union Station, I have no point of reference to gauge the changes. Circling around to riverside, the first thing I notice is a stream of humanity coming at me from across the Jackson Street bridge. The lemming-like mass flow was intoxicating. I backed up against a corner pillar/lamppost on the bridge to watch this diverse stream of office workers pass inches away from me while performing one of their daily rituals; returning home on the train. I tracked individual faces while listening to scattered bits of conversation float by. The diversity of the crowd was underscored by the newspaper hawker calling out hellos and insults in what seemed like all the languages of America’s melting pot. I was transfixed for almost half an hour.
Then I got hungry.
