Though not as epochal as Columbus’ discovery, I found a new world on the shelves of the Albany Park branch of the Chicago Public Library. There, in a section labeled “fiction,” were books describing life as it was lived on city blocks not far from the Northwest Side neighborhood where I was a teenager.
Chicago has inspired generations of authors with a tactile sense of the city. Short-story writer Albert Halper painted a palpable word picture of the West Side: “Aunt Daisy would sit on the back porch and wait for a breeze with the rest of us, while a hundred yards to the south the Lake Street elevated roared and crashed along, hurtling its racket through the summer night like long-range artillery.”
For Chicagoans currently coming of age, there isn’t a televised equivalent of the books that provided my first glimpse of our city’s textures. They certainly won’t get that goose-pimples thrill from watching “The Good Wife,” the CBS show that has a Chicago storyline but is filmed elsewhere.
“The Good Wife,” whose third season starts Sunday evening, gets some things spot on. In courtroom scenes, Chicago judges are impartial — dishing out put-downs to lawyers for both sides. The show’s premise is that a Windy City pol, convicted of corruption, starts campaigning to regain his office from behind bars. Rod Blagojevich played a similar parlay of shamelessness and outsize ego during his first trial and reprised it this year, shaking hands on his way into the courthouse like he was working the crowd at a political rally.
Yet the series doesn’t have the feel of Chicago, and no wonder. Beth Kushnick, the show’s set decorator, notes on her blog: “I did not travel to Chicago for research on the ‘Good Wife.'”
Kushnick, who by phone recalled being in Chicago once, said that New York was surveyed for locations, presumably chosen to resemble Chicago, though the criteria aren’t clear.
When a script called for a scene in Wrigley Field, Kushnick’s colleagues “scouted baseball parks.” Note the plural. Yet what ballpark could serve as a stand-in for Wrigley Field? Some seasons it has more fans than the team that plays there, and they’re not just Chicagoans. On game days, busloads of them come from Wisconsin and Indiana just to be in a ballpark celebrated for ivy-covered walls, not home-field advantage. Thank goodness it was decided to move the scene to a nonbaseball setting.
Some scenes take place in mover-and-shaker restaurants that look exactly like a Chicagoan might picture them to be — in Manhattan. Yet Chicago has photogenic politicians’ hangouts: Lou Mitchell’s for breakfast; Manny’s deli for lunch; Gibsons steakhouse for dinner. They have a distinctive look and clientele mix, as Mitchell once explained to me. Saturday mornings, his West Loop restaurant hosted two groups: judges and what he termed “our West Side crowd.” It was a polite way of acknowledging the Chicago tradition that reins of power, and power-breakfast joints, are shared by elected officials and mobsters.
Manny’s regulars hardly resemble Eli Gold, the slick, sharp-dressing political guru on “The Good Wife.” They’re more on the model of David Axelrod, who held court there long before going off to Barack Obama’s White House. His mother once described Axelrod as looking “like an unmade bed.”
Her verdict’s architectural equivalent is absent from “The Good Wife.” Chicago skyscrapers are visible through the windows of the law firm where the eponymous character works, via backdrops installed in Manhattan office buildings, Kushnick notes. But where is the nitty-gritty look that gives visual flavor to the neighborhoods?
Chicago is the city of bungalows. In its two-flats, owner and tenant are piggybacked. Maybe when they hear “two flats,” New York producers think it means the musical key of B-flat major.
Chicago is a city of alleys, where kick the can is the equivalent of a national sport. Its gangways are shortcuts to school, a youngster’s version of an aviator’s great circle route. To get its streets out of the mud, some were raised to the second-floor level of older houses, consigning the first floor to a kind of below-ground grotto. In some, residents have concretized the metaphor with statues of the Virgin.
Storefront signs witness the Polish and Mexican immigrants who’ve passed along Milwaukee Avenue; the Germans who moved up Lincoln Avenue; the Pakistanis, Indians and Arabs who’ve made Devon Avenue their rialto.
You’d never know that from watching “The Good Wife.” More’s the pity, the day may come when younger Chicagoans won’t learn that by walking the city. As elsewhere, urban decay has given way to urban renewal. Neighborhoods have been gentrified out of recognition, factories and warehouses transformed into lofts — marked with the same pasted-on balconies as in other cities.
Some blocks in Bronzeville look just as novelist Richard Wright and poet Gwendolyn Brooks described them. Other parts of the neighborhood have been transformed into anonymous town-house developments.
Maxwell Street was an open-air market where pushcart vendors touted bargains in a variety of languages worthy of the Tower of Babel. It’s been upscaled by boutiques and trendy restaurants. Seeing a nonkosher dish on one menu, I pointed to a renovated tenement. When my grandmother lived there, I told the waitress, she wouldn’t have cooked that for Shabbat dinner. Giving me a knee under the table, my wife whispered: “She hasn’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
Eventually, it might not matter if shows set in Chicago are filmed here. So television producers better get their cameras here quickly, should any of them want to show viewers — and preserve a DVD record for future generations — what Nelson Algren saw when he said of Chicago: “Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real.”
