As I’m writing this, on the first of May in the year 28 A.N. (Anno Noah, aka the 28^th Gregorian-calendar year of Joakim Noah, aka 2013), the weather in Chicago is capital-A Amazing. Almost mouth-on-penis amazing. Unofficially, I pronounce this day the start of alley season. As most Chicagoans know, the weather here ranges from unpredictable to unpredictably shitty, but once the sun comes out for its 3.5-month visit, there is no better city in the world.

In the winter, it’s tough to get good photos of alleys because the sky is in a perpetually blackened state that reminds me of visiting Mordor, or worse, Sweden in March. It’s also difficult to mouth-mulch three bags of Doritos and shotgun a can of A.M. vodka in an alley because the cold makes my hands feel like I’m fingering an ice sculpture of Ann Coulter. That’s why it was so rewarding to fire up my new whip­ and cruise down some alleys this past weekend. Which apparently can be an intimidating sight, since I found this under my windshield wiper last week:

One of my stops was the wooden alley located behind the Cardinal’s residence in Gold Coast. The best part about this spot just may be that the wood blocks give off a pleasant, non-garbagey smell. It’s almost like the smell air holds minutes before a summer rain, and it’s wonderful. Which also got me thinking about how in the middle of summer, most alleys smell about as nice as a shit-stained diaper.

The main reasons for this are the garbage-cooking summer heat and the fire-alley effect, which according to Stormwater, boosts the temperature of cities by 6 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than rural areas. Chicago’s dark rooftops and pavement absorb and radiate heat, creating an urban heat island which “results in higher energy use for cooling buildings, causing atmospheric pollution to create ground-level ozone.”

The Chicago Department of Environment is actually working to ameliorate this effect by “constructing light-colored roofs, using alternative energy sources, increasing green space, and installing rooftop gardens.” The most effective measure, which you may start seeing in your own alley soon, is the installation of alternative paving that consists of fine gravel packed into one-inch rings. Though it might prove to be a bit messier, the surface reflects less heat and is also porous, helping to avoid the type of flooding that Chicago experienced this spring. It’s something I’m going to keep an eye out for while I’m hauling road beers on late-night alley strolls this summer.

Location: 870 W. Belmont Ave. 

Fifteen years ago, this was exactly the type of alley where you’d find a large man leaning against a telephone pole, puffing on a hand-rolled heater, tattooed and unimpressed, greeting strangers with the glint of an exposed knife. Nowadays, there’s a very good brunch spot around the corner and twentyishes stroll the surrounding neighborhood in droves, shopping for theme-party costumes and dildos. Needless to say, this stretch of Lakeview has changed, and that makes this alley all the more interesting. Located directly behind The Alley–the leather- and piercings-filled shop that has been catering to punks and goths for more than 30 years–this alley is festively adorned with renditions of a demonic bat-dog, James Dean, Kurt Cobain, Frank Zappa (I don’t even have a damn clue how I know what he looks like, but for some reason I do), Elvis, and blazing skeletons. Basically, any stroller-pushing SUV owner that manages to accidentally drive past probably thinks it’s a big ‘ol pile of shit and graffiti and newspapers and fuck. Whatever. Haters gonna hate, potatoes gonna potate.

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Location: 63 W. Superior St. Photos by Powder and Radical Dave.

Considering the cabbage one has to shell out to get a stiff drink in this neighborhood ($15 for a Belvedere neat at Zed 451 around the corner), this River North alley is quite the budget saver. It also runs in a zig-zag formation through an entire city block and is completely tucked away from the street, which means that you can dress up as Santa, whip out a portable speaker, blast some trap mixes, and proceed to rock your nuts off. Of course, attempting to finish off a bag of cheap wine can basically boil down to a situation that includes a lot of shit hitting a really big fan, but I’m not one to judge. So, if you’re looking to save a few bucks, hit the bricks for a hazy hazy night out, crush some children’s dreams, and feel like you’re number one and all these other bitches are none, then this is the spot.

Here are some Santa pick-up lines if you’re feeling extra adventurous:

I’ve got something special in the sack for you!

How about you slip down my chimney?

I can get you off the Naughty list.

I got your stocking stuffer right here.

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Photos from City Spaces by Bob Thall. The Center for American Places, 2002. Buy here.

Bob Thall is kind of like the Ansel Adams of urban Chicago photography. He’s been photographing its gritty landscape and concrete canyons for more than 30 years, and in the process has published The Perfect City, which documents a changing downtown, and The New American Village, which captures images of the areas surrounding O’Hare Airport. However, my (obvious) favorite is City Spaces, which contains some excellent photographs of Chicago’s alleys.

Thall studied architecture in college, and was a night owl. He would often cruise the city with his friends and they would critique the architecture of various neighborhoods. Sometimes, they would pick out a house they saw and manufacture a story about its residents. For example, they would describe in detail an imagined bachelor rebuilding a carburetor on his kitchen table.  After a while, he changed his major to photography and forgot about the imagining-lives game.

Toting his camera around, Thall started to roam neighborhoods where he could find “ornate old structures showing the scars of hard use and poverty.” Afterwards, he focused on photographing downtown. During the 1970s, downtown was still a pretty seedy place lined with street-level shops that were only beginning to be replaced with sparkling lobbies and Radio Shacks. Over a period of twenty years, he captured images of the transformation, which he published in 1994 as The Perfect City. One day while working on The New American Village in 1996, Thall used his last sheet of unexposed film to snap a photo of an alley:

The above image stuck in his mind, and soon he was systematically exploring downtown alleys. He found that these alleys showed off a lot of history. Here, paint and marks faded slowly since rain could not easily reach them, and chalk marks signifying poison drops by rat-control crews remained for years. The experience reminded Thall that spotting “beauty and significance where it’s not anticipated is one of the most important gifts of photography.” Thall also stated that “investigating these spaces reminded me of my earlier sense of the city as a mysterious landscape to explore.”

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Though the photos come from a small segment of Chicago’s landscape and most of these spots can be visited in one day, Thall can obviously shoot. There are many other interesting alleys to be found in the city’s surrounding neighborhoods, but this is a great coffee-table book that’s worth checking out.

Nowadays, Thall is Chair of the Photography Department at Columbia College Chicago.

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 Photo by Xavier Nuez

The alley, with its dearth of kinetic energy, is a great place to have one too many drinks and enjoy the outdoors amid the heavy, pregnant silence of a humid summer night. Downing rotgut to the wee hours of fuck-this-shit o’clock also makes it quite easy to cross over from lubricated to pensive. My colleague Jonathon Schaff shares some thoughts on…well, he shares some thoughts on life, man, so just read them and then suck down a bottle of cheap white wine that hopefully serves as the catalyst for a four-day bender.

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“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great that I thought I was in a dream.” - Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Being drunk for four days is a no brainer. This is what I’ve come to know. Each time with beer, once with gin, again with whiskey and wine. I’m drinking a bottle right now, wine made in 2010 by an Argentine in the Valle de Uco. Tonight it’s in my head in Chicago. That’s more than 5,300 miles and nearly three years away. I never buy wine but I bought this on impulse, to have it and to see what would happen. And look. Look at what happens.

Here in Chicago, there are no stars. The stars have all gone away. There is only Orange Glow! Orange Glow is the color of the very very end of a sunset, right before it blips out completely. Orange Glow covers everything all through the night, so that night is never truly dark. And like all stars, the stars we used to have need a stage, a brilliant black stage with black velvet curtains so that they can shine so fine and shimmer. Because stars and Orange Glow cannot coexist, the stars packed up their twinkles and hit the road.

One wonders about the night sky in Valle de Uco, the viticultural region southwest of the Argentine city of Mendoza. One suspects that their stars are so fine. That they bless the endless fields of grapevines with their light, so much so that in the darkest hour of night one could find their way along the alleys that run between the vines. Alleys not cobbled but made of rich, viticultural earth. These are alleys, too. They belong to the wise, industrious people of the Valle de Uco, who have produced many fine bottles of Malbec in the year 2010 and who had the clarity of thought, the inspiration, to send their bottles out into the world, into the Whole Foods of the world, where they would be stacked attractively and sold for a reasonable fee.

If you asked me about the four nights of drinking, and why I’d strung them together like Christmas lights, I’d tell you it’s because of the change in seasons. This is something all Chicagoans know. In this part of the world, summer dies slowly and then all at once. Fall is but a poorly delivered eulogy given by a well-meaning priest who never knew summer, who hadn’t known a real thing about her, so he eulogizes in generalities. It is up to us, the people of summer, to properly celebrate her life. We are duty bound. In this way, the end of summer is just as swell a party as its beginning. Not a feast before the famine, but a wake held in all the bars of the city at once, their street-facing windows propped open ‘til close. All for summer, too soon gone.

But how, you ask. How did you do it? Four nights, my God. And now wine? And now wine?

Each morning after my nights I awoke early. Sometimes as early as eight. I would wake with a start, then piece together my whereabouts. I would assess my general condition, then categorize the images that flew around my head like frightened birds in a steel cage. Sometimes it was hard, the narrative elusive, any meaning outside of my reach. But then, each morning, I’d feel the breeze from the lake float in through my room’s open window. The air was soft and inviting, as it has been for weeks. The window in my room looks out onto the alley that runs behind our apartment. I’d hear children shouting below and go the window and see them. Playing catch, feet slipping on the stones, they keep the ball below the dip of the telephone lines. I’d think for a long time about the day ahead.  Of all it stood to offer. The games to be won, electrical current to be avoided, dusty alleys where I could shout loud enough, late enough to wake a person from a dream in order that they might conceive another.

By Jonathon Schaff

Photo by Xavier Nuez

Jenn Swann shares some thoughts on enjoying a cold one in an alley:

It wasn’t even 2 o’clock yet in the indiscernible hours between Saturday and Sunday when I had already navigated through the drunken masses at a Wicker Park street festival, danced to a friend’s band in a nondescript loft overlooking the Kennedy Expressway, and instigated the pilgrimage for carne asada tacos at La Pasadita, a feat which is only acceptable after midnight, when all other taco counters have closed and the line for Big Star—the more decent taco stop—is halfway around the block.

Still, there was only one thing left to do in the hours leading up to the city’s last bars’ last call: pay a visit to the local war veterans’ hall. But this wasn’t just any veterans’ hall that kept freakishly late–night hours; it was one that turns into a liquor–slinging, popcorn–eating, karaoke–singing bar on the weekends for all the huddled masses yearning to break free and sing along to Freddie Mercury jams.

That night, I fit the description perfectly. I shuffled into the cafeteria–esque drinking hall bustling with veterans of another sort: underage ravers, glitzed–up clubbers, and dressed–down drifters belonging to a chain–smoking tribe clad in plaid. Every karaoke song was the best karaoke song—so good in fact, that each tune inspired a fanatic clapping and fist–pounding rendition on the faux–wood–top folding tables. We displayed the kind of behavior that’s only appropriate for a place that doesn’t trust its customers to use real glassware.

But the plastic pitchers of PBR were fine by me and the two college–pals–turned-drinking–buddies that I fatefully took a seat next to that night. As we sang along to Billie Joel and Billie Jean (not my lover), the karaoke was great until suddenly, it wasn’t. We needed an even bigger diversion. We even contemplated getting into a fist–fight to cure our boredom. It wasn’t until we ordered another $10 pitcher that we realized we desperately needed to evacuate the veterans’ hall immediately and with great stealth.

With teamwork, a bit of charisma, and a lot of PBR, we managed to sneak the pitcher of beer past the large man in the “Security” t–shirt at the building’s entrance and into a more pleasant drinking environment: the alley behind it. Without the racket of karaoke and the stench of cigarettes to compete with, we were able to set up camp and do some star–gazing in a well–lit driveway within the alley, all while passing around a pitcher.

For someone who spends very little time taking in the views afforded by Chicago’s alleyways unless she has to throw out the garbage after a massive party or hunt for discarded cardboard boxes on moving day, I was excited and intrigued by this new scenic underworld illuminated by fluorescent street lamps and occasional car headlights. The alley was bustling with murals—okay, they were more like love letters and gang tags all mangled into one violently passionate message on the side of a dumpster—and rare, indigenous species with exotic fur and long tails.

Most fascinating of all was the species of nocturnal humans that we encountered during our alleyway visit: muscled dudes on low–rider bicycles, lovers holding hands, and gangsters in tinted Cadillacs all gave us a nod or a wave or a smile. The friendly acknowledgments were refreshing for a city where most people don’t even look each other in the eye on a sidewalk. But in the alley, it was different. It was as if we belonged to a secret subculture of transient alley–dwellers, all looking to fight off a case of boredom on a Saturday night, even more so than the karaoke singers in the building next door.

Maybe it was all that jovial Bruce Springsteen we clapped along to earlier or the approval of our newfound alley comrades, but there was something about drinking a pitcher of beer in an alley that was just more fun than drinking it in a bar, or even a war veterans’ hall, for that matter. The alley was a labyrinth of amusements that seemed miles away from the zombie–filled, taxi–cluttered streets on the other side. You didn’t have to make a reservation, vie for a table, or make small talk with morons at the bar… well, because there was no bar. It was pure urban hibernation, which is always best endured with a pitcher of beer and friends who don’t let friends sing karaoke at the veterans’ hall.

By Jenn Swann

Brett Busang is a D.C.-area artist that specializes in realist paintings and maintains an appreciation for alleys. His work has been compared to that of Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper, and has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York and the Everson Museum in Syracuse. He also maintains a blog and his writing has appeared in American Art Review, the New York Press, and New York Newsday. Basically, Brett seems so productive that it just makes me want to drink a gallon of coffee and write and clean my carpet and do whatever faster with more energy. After exchanging some emails, Brett was nice enough to provide some painting samples and companion short stories. Here is the second of a series:

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Tarpaper and Sunlight

An older city’s ingredient-base is very simple: a pile of bricks; skids of lumber; a keg of nails. And its creations were intended to last – though certain before-and-after shots may suggest otherwise. The hill-clinging structures in a buggy-era photo yield without much fuss to a trunk road, then a highway, then a public works project that denudes the hill entirely. It is bewildering, yet hardly extraordinary, to realize that the teeming neighborhoods of the past have become public areas into which long-ago lives do not intrude. You can rest assured that downtown parking-lots have been super-imposed and that plaques tell a rather abbreviated tale.  When poring over photographs of New York City, the sight of a shot tower astonishes me – in part because I’m looking to be astonished, but only in part. At one time, it had a purpose. And it lasted for no longer than it could earn its keep. If it were here today, nobody would know what to do with it. In melancholy moments, I wonder how we can all go on, knowing what we do about what we can and cannot save.

Yet raising a structure is rarely attendant with thoughts of its demise. Among those who provide us with shelter, “onward and upward” best characterizes the creation ethic. When the Carver neighborhood, where I painted this picture, was built, people got on with things. We think life is hard now. In the good old days, running water was a thing to be gotten and not had; sanitation happened in an outhouse; human relations were knock-down, drag-out affairs. We don’t crave privacy because we can get it. But live in a porous little place with ten other people. Take a room that isn’t big enough for a chest-of-drawers and a bed. Get up in the morning and hope you’ve got everything you came with. Poor people a hundred years ago had no safety nets other than community, family, or happenstance. They lived among their own kind and, often as not, died in the sight of those who were used to lights going out.

When this particular scene vanished, I did not experience my customary sense of mortal sympathy. I was relieved that x number of people might be moving to a better place.

-Brett Busang

]]> http://www.alleyconnoisseur.com/?feed=rss2&p=142 0 http://www.alleyconnoisseur.com/?p=136 http://www.alleyconnoisseur.com/?p=136#comments Thu, 28 Jun 2012 17:51:49 +0000 Raf http://www.alleyconnoisseur.com/?p=136

The Way Out by Brett Busang

Brett Busang is a D.C.-area artist that specializes in realist paintings and maintains an appreciation for alleys. His work has been compared to that of Thomas Eakins and Edward Hopper, and has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of the City of New York City and the Everson Museum in Syracuse. He also maintains a blog and his writing has appeared in American Art Review, the New York Press, and New York Newsday. Basically, Brett seems so productive that it just makes me want to drink a gallon of coffee and write and clean my carpet and do whatever faster with more energy. After exchanging some emails, Brett was nice enough to provide some painting samples and companion short stories. Here is the first of a series:

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The Way Out

Capitol Hill is graced with alleys in the same way Savannah is with squares or Portland, Oregon with bicycle-paths. Alleys help defuse community unrest and contribute to an outdoor feeling. (In Adams-Morgan, you get your community directly from the street because there’s no other way to do it.)  The municipal side of DC isn’t known except to the people who live here. Tourists hew to the well-beaten paths spelled out in their guides – or recommended by the home-folk who caution them to steer clear of whatever might turn a pleasant trip into a police procedural.

DC alleys, particularly in Northeast, are spacious and sunny. Inside of them, pick-up basketball and skateboard practice thrive.  They are able to absorb energies as diverse as gardening, pigeon-keeping, and car repair. People hang out on their porches, but they go to the alleys to do things. Alleys foster informal activities. They diffuse impulses that might not have anyplace else to go.

People who have lived in the ‘burbs come to city life on a sling. They get the hang of it by degrees – or don’t and move back. Personal safety isn’t guaranteed; nor can it be expeditiously arranged. It’s got to be cooler-handed. Where you are separated from your neighbor by yard and hedge, your lives do not ideally intersect.  There is no negotiating for space because there is plenty to go around (as long as you can pay for it!) In any city, space is experienced in the third dimension. Because it is communal, it is also conceptual. You have to ask for it because it is not provided. You have to negotiate the best deal because other people have their way of doing things. You are dependent on the spatial needs of others to determine what yours are.

And as long as the social fabric holds, it isn’t a bad system. Far better to deal with something finite than to pretend that this finite something is not finite and end up claiming more than your fair share. The secret to any community is compromise. Where there is a more rigid sense of ownership, compromise is not possible. Nor is there any life as it is known where people have to give in order to get – which, in a community of “others” means whatever you can keep for yourself.

-Brett Busang

Photos by Xavier Nuez

Xavier Nuez is a talented, Chicago-based photographer who also happens to be fascinated with alleys. A former commercial photographer, Xavier works in the dark of night while shooting alleys and run-down locales. His long-exposure photos aim to capture “something positive in some of the most reviled, ugly, and scary places in the city,” and have been featured on ABC 7 and the New York Times, the latter of which called his Alleys & Ruins series “a masterpiece.” Since his photos take up to 90 minutes to capture and he tends to hang out in areas where vagrants, gang members, and drug addicts reside, working on the job sometimes resembles an episode of The Wire. Xavier has had guns pointed at him, has been questioned by the police, and has even been accused of being a terrorist. Slow. Clap. After exchanging some emails, Xavier gave the green light for Alley Connoisseur to showcase some of his work. Do yourself a favor and head on over to his website to see the photos in their original, colorfully tripped-out form.

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Location: 170 S. Cesar Chavez Blvd.

Dallas has more shopping centers per capita than any other city in the United States, and perhaps that has something to do with its glam-obsessed culture and its extensive alley system. In fact, the 1,402 miles of alleys nearly puts it in Chicago’s stratosphere. While visiting, I did get the feeling that Dallas was a conservative, less-vapid version of Los Angeles. Seemingly everyone drives cars, there are no bikes or bike lanes in sight, and a pretty cool downtown trolley system remains largely underutilized. I’m not entirely sure, but it’s quite possible that the people here do not give a shitfuckdick about conservation and throw out a lot of trash. Also, two things really surprised me about the city: Though it has the money to build massive highway systems (it has the third largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies in the country), 47% of its alleys are rated unsatisfactory due to damage from heavy garbage truck traffic. Also, not many of them are very interesting. One would think that with all these belles constantly throwing out all sorts of trinkety trash, walking down an alley would be like tripping over the half-buried treasure chests on some sort of pirate-hooker island.

When my friend and I finally found an interesting alley, I whipped my fingers out of my invisible gun holsters and basically solidified my rep as just the damn best. Yeeeehaw. I also discovered that finding an alley, setting up a bunch of pricey photo equipment in it, and hanging out while looking uncomfortably white is a lot easier when you’re packing heat. Now, walking around while strapped is illegal in Raf county, but I was visiting a friend who happened to be a Dallas cop. Therefore, buying water bottles from passing homeless men (which I did) and telling pretty ladies that they’re “packing quite the fart bakery back there” (which I wish I did) is pretty much game. I didn’t have to quickly, nervously look around corners once, twice–I just stood around feeling like I was in charge of this dark corner of the world. So besides being baffled at how Dallas women have their hair curled in time for brunch and at how a friend sped down the highway driving the Bentley of a Russian lady he had picked up at the Ritz Carlton, this was definitely the highlight of my trip. Just, yes.