Perfect frankness in a city guide is as rare as perfect honesty in a politician. Proof of that proposition is offered in three new guidebooks from Chicago Review Press. The most interesting of these are Sweet Home Chicago: The Real City Guide, by Sherry Kent and Mary Szpur, and Norman Mark’s Chicago: Walking, Bicycling & Driving Tours of the City. Each is the third edition of a deservedly popular guide, updated to reflect the updatings that Chicago itself has undergone in the last few years. And each is a fine book whose failings are as troubling as its virtues are admirable.
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Accordingly, Kent and Szpur tried to bring this new version of their guide “closer to the mainstream,” which may upset older readers. The phrase “so-called police riot,” used here to describe the 1968 romp through demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention, smacks less of revisionism than of amnesia. And it is not mere nostalgia that makes Nancy Banks’s description of Hyde Park from the second edition (“chauvinistic, isolated, and self-consciously intellectual”) more pointed than the new one offered by Philip Charles, Jack Helbig, and their editors (“cosmopolitan, tolerant of eccentricity, very liberal”).
Norman Mark, on the other hand, has always paddled as happily in the mainstream as a duck in a pond. Mark remains the unregenerate Chicago guy–wisecracking, romantic, a bit of a rube with an appetite for the dubious in all its forms. Mark’s Chicago really is a guidebook, with step-by-step directions for 26 tours designed mainly with the ambitious pedestrian in mind. Not everyone will be as enamored as he is of gawking at posh hotels, where the rich might cavort at rates up to $4,000 a night; and a few may conclude, on the basis of the anecdotes supplied here, that Chicago was indeed a toddlin’ town–until about 20 years ago. (Sadly, no one recently has hired World War II bombardiers, as the National Pickle Packers did at their 1946 convention, to drop pickles into barrels from atop the Hotel Continental.) But Mark’s fund of anecdotes (some of which may be true) is inexhaustible, which makes his work that rare thing, a guidebook that is as much fun to read as it is to use.
Indeed, Chicagoans in general have become masters of the inverted boast, as befits citizens of a city that has invariably been good at being bad. (I will always admire the local choreographer who explained to a reporter that one of the spurs to innovation in Chicago dance is its backwardness: dancers here are so ill-trained, she said, that they don’t know what they’re not supposed to do.) Both of these books, consequently, devote much attention to crimes of a very picturesque sort–brothel keeping, gang shooting, politics–which have given the city its reputation as a Six Flags for the antisocial.
Publishers, of course, are less interested in wisdom than sales. Is it assumed that only black people would feel comfortable on the south side? If so, then publishers must further assume that black people do not buy guidebooks. Either suggestion is pernicious. Do they assume that white people, even those who crave “ethnic” experiences, do not want to go there? Probably; that reluctance is real enough. But to the extent that such reluctance is owed to racism it ought not to be catered to. Besides, it is just as likely that it is owed to ignorance of the sort that guidebooks at their best seek to dispel.
Admittedly, Jagger’s guitar is not the Pieta. More in a class with Ernie Banks’s bowling ball, in fact. But it shines with significance compared to what Danilov does list: the spark plug collections, Mother Teresa souvenirs, 1920s iron lungs, and similar jetsam that has washed up at the zoos and aquariums, nature centers and arboretums, historical houses, children’s museums, religious and ethnic museums, and fine arts museums and galleries in the city and suburbs.
Chicago’s Museums: A Complete Guide to the City’s Cultural Attractions by Victor J. Danilov, Chicago Review Press, $9.95.
