Cyclo-Flaneuring Through Industrial Chicago

flâ·neur

fläˈnər,-ˈnœr/

noun

1. an idler or lounger who wanders about the city, commenting.

A version of this essay will be printed in Belt Publishing's  Chicago Anthology

On Cyclo-Flaneuring 

Starting with my bike on my shoulder, riding me down the stairs of the leaning brick three-flat I share with about twelve other people, I start off on Kedzie Boulevard. This was The Suburbs back when the bicycle was invented; the guys that used to live in my neighborhood probably rode their wheels six blocks south to the elevated railway that’s in the process of becoming an elevated sidewalk, ending at the Finkl Steel Plant (1902-2014). Inside its open doors I watch people in what look like aluminum-foil space suits guide a vat of glowing orange goop over channels carved in the cement foundation. The vat tips and the glowing liquid, molting metal, spills into the channels, then flows off beyond my sight.

The workers in the plant are maintaining one of the oldest traditions of human civilization, passed on straight from the gods. Allegedly, metalwork came to us when the goddess Athena told Perseus, the greatest half-mortal hero of the ancient world, to use a shining flat rock as a spear tip when he and his flying horse Pegasus launched a death-from-above attack on the Chimera, a fire spitting beast that pestered the Anatolians, in Modern-day Turkey. When Perseus hurled the spear, the wooden shaft vaporized in the Chimera’s breath, but the metal tip continued to fall, right into the beast’s gullet, and through the other end. After the hero and the flying horse got their congratulations and flew off to the next adventure, the Anatolians examined the melted metal lying next to the slain

creature, and from that deduced the beginnings of modern metallurgy. It began with bronze, which is an alloy of tin and copper. It’s great for making complex tools, hinges, pulleys, and agricultural implements because it resists corrosion and is easily worked and molded. At the Art Institute of Chicago they have one of two rare bronze figurines of a horned goat man, holding a staff. It’s eight inches tall and six thousand years old. Six thousand! They found it in an unmarked grave in Turkey, near where the Chimera lay. Turned green from the elements, the carved eyes and individual fingers show a degree of craftsmanship that died with whatever lost civilization created the little guy, and wasn't seen again for thousands of years. The goat man action figure is remarkable not only because of its detail, but because bronze isn’t very durable. If a bronze tool sees any kind of regular handling it will have to be beaten back into shape every so often. In the tradition of the goat man, these days bronze is used in statues and totems that commemorate one lost thing or another, but not much else. Industrial anthropologists often see bronze work as an introduction to more durable metals, like steel.

Unlike bronze, the production of hard, strong, lightweight steel requires a tremendous amount of energy (as we shall see, this is also true of cities). You can’t just throw iron in a pot and smelt it over a campfire; you need a processed fuel like charcoal to get it flowing. Made by slow-roasting the moisture and volatile elements out of either wood or the bones of those enemies with inferior metallurgy, the leftover matter burns at twice the heat required to melt iron. The Anatolians, it is believed, were the first to harness the potential of charcoal with the creation of a “crucible,” a ceramic tomb that holds the melting iron above an insulated flame and allows the precise control of heat by blowing in oxygen with a primitive pump called a bellows, which is still used in domestic fireplaces, unchanged for eight thousand years. When the iron reaches a certain temperature, impurities like lead and mercury separate and float to the top to become slag. Carbon remains in the mix and bonds with the iron to make steel. 

Over time, the increasing need for steel production forces bellows to grow in size, requiring men to pump bellows with their hands, then legs, then in groups, then with horses –until the 1860s when Philander and Marion Roots develop a corkscrew-like fan that compresses and focuses air by the simple turning of a crank. This new, highly efficient device, the Roots Blower as the patent calls it, allows blast furnaces to grow from the size of rooms to the size of buildings in less than a generation. The crucible goes from a ceramic pot filled with a handful of ingots to a molting cauldron, lifted by cranes and pulleys, controlled by teams of men who smoke cigarettes on the sidewalk, watching me shift gears and dodge bits of slag and other street debris.

            This half-mile stretch of eastbound road is a busy, dangerous place to ride a bike. Old scrap trucks on their way to the recycling smelter, loaded down with tons of salvaged metal bits, are followed by boxy yellow machines with magnets on the bottom to pick up whatever the scrappers drop. City buses and tractor-trailers stop and go on the hot pavement, sinking in a little deeper every time. In the winter these dents fill with water that freezes and expands to make Chicago’s iconic potholes. There’s an ambient smell of diesel and tar. A hotshot in a new Mercedes is swerving around all these necessary obstacles of transport and industry in a desperate race against nobody to be first to the lowered barricade at the train crossing. The wind off his passenger side mirror strikes my hand. It’s just the lightest touch, but coupled with the speed and noise of his pass it’s enough to make me turn, hard, into the low curb, then over and onto the sidewalk. This sort of thing happens to cyclists in Chicago, and though we scream and curse and holler, it’s always with an impotence that’s best left off the written page. What can a flesh and bone man do against a metal chariot the size of a rhino?  Nobody should fee bad for me, though. If superstitious words have any power in this world, the spell I cast on that boy will reverberate through his entire family, forward and backwards in time, and even through his car and his car’s grandfather, Gottlieb Daimler, who, nearly a hundred years ago set his mind to solving the problem of the outlandish growth of the internal combustion engine, allowing gas-powered cars to assume the master role in transportation.

The automobile of Daimler’s era was too inefficient to be anything more than a noisy gimmick for shuttling the wealthy around. In those days a sports car might have 24-liters of combustion room inside the engine, roughly eight times the size of its twenty-first century equivalent.  Gottlieb Daimler, father of Mercedes, thought: why not put a Roots Blower on a motor? The force-feeding of air increases the density of ignitable oxygen, meaning more fuel can be burned, thus creating a larger explosion without increasing the size of the engine. The supercharger is born. Using the engine’s spinning crankshaft to power the supercharger’s fans, dumb rich jerks everywhere can enjoy running people off the road at speeds thought unimaginable a few years earlier.

            The curb has done some damage to my front wheel. The pneumatic inner tube, an invention pioneered by bicycles that we’ve graciously allowed other machines to take advantage of, popped in a way that bike mechanics call a snake bite: two little holes right next to each other at the spot where the rim and curb struck, and pinched the tube. The bike shop where I work is two blocks away, so I trudge north on Clybourn, guiding my bike like an injured pony, satisfied with the secret knowledge that after Gottlieb Daimler died his company was merged with that of his greatest rival, Carl Benz. They've since dropped Daimler's name altogether. Curse fulfilled.

            The mechanic on duty is my mentor George. He’s the patriarch of a large family that’s been supported by fixing bikes for thirty years. He knows by the back-and-forth wobbling of my rim that I’ve broken a spoke.

Bicycle wheels are held together by tension. Under normal conditions each spoke will have about 1200 Newtons of potential energy between the hub and rim, keeping the wheel suspended in a rigid state of equilibrium –a symptom of which being a wobble-less rim. A Newton is roughly the same as the force exerted by the weight of an apple. For comparison, it takes the concentrated weight of 1100 apples to split an inch-thick block of concrete in half. So, when a spoke suddenly snaps it transfers a lot of energy throughout the wheel, affecting all the other spokes unequally. If a mechanic is to measure the tension on each spoke of my wheel, they will find that some of the spokes have two or three times the tension of other spokes. When the broken spoke is replaced the lopsided tension will continue to affect the wheel, even if the rim wobble looks to be cured. Therefore, it’s important that the repairer use care to tension and de-tension each spoke, employing secret audio, visual, and tactile cues to ensure that the wheel returns to a state of harmony. However, modern shops have figured out it’s more cost-effective to replace the spoke without checking tension, then wait for the wheel to implode, then sell a new one, eliminating the shop’s need for a master mechanic and his costly salary.

In my imaginary world there will be a requiem, brought on because of, and for, technology. Electric engines are superseding the meticulously engineered and super-charged hearts of cardom. First they come as hybrids, then purely electric. Replacing the Mercedes driving terrorists of the city is the driverless car -controlled by radar, video cameras, microprocessors, and luck.  Meanwhile, servo-enhanced shifting mechanisms, motorized booster hubs, and dynamo-powered lights are becoming ubiquitous on bicycles while smartphones tell cyclists where they are and where they’re going. By sharing an understanding of these linked technologies the car mechanic and the bike mechanic, so ideologically separate for so many years, will become one. From the view of shop owners and management this symbiosis cannot be permitted to last; progress is defined as the act of disrupting stability, or so I hear from car commercials and Silicon Valley techies. In an attempt to automate repair as another way to eliminate costly service personnel, manufacturers will give the various zip-zaps, doo-dads, and vroom-vrooms cognizance. This is the limit of computerization, because as theorized by Douglas Adams in his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy books, when you give self-awareness to an infinitely discerning entity like an internet-enabled supercomputer, it will follow its own consciousness to its logical conclusion and realize that no matter what we do we’re all going to die when the sun burns out, so there’s really no point in doing anything, ever. Mechanics will then be called upon to fix this.

            I’ve righted the wheel using a spoke from the storeroom that was made in Belgium by a machine that -legend has it- they recovered after being buried in a field. During the onset of the Second World War many Belgians, afraid of being overrun and losing all their worldly possessions, took to burying everything of value. The spoke company wrapped their precious machine in a tarp and hid it under a sports field along with the neighbor’s art collection. After the war they excavated the machine, but the art is still down there somewhere; the owner died and took with her the exact

location of her treasure. My friends who travel abroad tell me stories like this are not uncommon outside the U.S. Native Belgians I’ve spoken to on the subject warn me that the forests are filled with unexploded ordinance that could go off if disturbed. A likely story. Seems like the kind of thing I’d tell a would-be treasure hunter if I were a few potential shovel strokes from my big score.

While I’m finishing my bike repair, George encourages me to check out the new velodrome, a type of cycling arena, on the south side. He says the racers competing at 40+ mph on the banked walls of the wooden track break parts with violent regularity, and they’ll pay a premium for somebody who can make repairs quick and correct.

My grandmother, eighty years before this conversation, embodies the customer end of this sentiment while writing to the Schwinn Corporation of Chicago, requesting that they make her a racing bicycle suited for her feminine frame. She is a velodrome racer, a respected athlete of the most popular sport in America up until the war that caused the Belgians to bury everything. Up and down the Great Lakes and in every metropolitan area with the guts to call itself a city lives at least one velodrome. Post-depression Chicago has six. This is during a time when women have the newly obtained right to vote and are launching ever more successful campaigns for equality. Doris Kopsky is winning championships on the eastern seaboard and soon Lyli Herse will set speed and endurance records in France, some of which still stand. So, it’s a shock when one of the bosses of Schwinn writes back to my grandmother something to the effect of: “Mam, we make the best bicycles in the world for the greatest racers in the world, not women.”

            Schwinn will go on to cede its manufacturing base to Japan in the eighties, before folding entirely. Other, more equitable bike builders will take their place. Not to be deterred by the great industrial chauvinists of Chicago, my grandmother writes to her friends William Harley and Arthur Davidson in Milwaukee, and asks if they’d make her a bike.

“Sure thing Elfreida, come visit in six weeks.”

            These family histories are always shrouded by the fog of the oral tradition, but there is a photographic history of at least this much: Harley and Davidson make my grandmother a bike, and a good one, designed exactly for her body type and aggressive riding style. Though whether through miscommunication or some other confusion, the builders constructed the wrong type of bike. Instead of fabricating her the sort with pedals and skinny tires, they make her the sort with a roaring engine. My grandmother takes up the new motorized version of cycling, calling her bike the “Buzz Machine.” 

            My grandmother’s shifting interest towards the convenience and quick thrills of motorization foretells the sporting preferences of the nation: as of the closing of the Finkl Steel factory, NASCAR is America’s most popular spectator sport, and one where men and women compete as equals.

            On the ride down to the velodrome I pass the wreckage of a steam ship called the Silver Spray. It caught on fire and sunk one night while ferrying some college kids to a casino, south of the city. Zebra mussels, an alien mollusk species without natural predators or nutritional value, who can out-compete the native invertebrates –which are the basis of the Great Lakes aquatic food chain– surround the Silver Spray like chocolate sprinkles on a cupcake. From roosts like this their filter feeding helps to make Lake Michigan’s waters cleaner than they’ve been in thirty years, filtering out the toxic waste from a century of industrial progress.

            When the lake was at its dirtiest, Nike missiles were installed along the lakefront trail, ostensibly to defend us from the Soviets, but also to give jobs to the wards of the most powerful aldermen. The carcinogenic chemicals they used to wash the launch pads killed many more citizens than any foreign threat. Somewhere in a playground near one of the far southern parks that nobody ever visits there’s a plaque about it. The contaminated sites are all fenced off these days. My path takes me along the western border of one, which they’ve turned into a bird sanctuary.

            Past that, in a spot that used to be a beach, the parks department has designated a “native plants revitalization zone.” Chicago’s shore was once a prairie wetland, but it’s hard to play beach volleyball in waist-high grass, so they scoured the sand until it turned raw. But now that much of the population has left the south side, and the beach is mostly unused, the earthmovers lay dormant. Ecology experts wearing cargo pants and wide-brimmed hats plant seeds one day and spray poison the next, selecting their targets with scholarly precision. This is how a pristine ecosystem is produced. Funny how ecology, the act of reversing industrial blight, has become a thriving industry of its own.

            The land the velodrome is on has a history of machines and sweat so old and persistent that it has eroded the topsoil away. For years they’ve been replacing it with trucked-in dirt from downstate, slowly covering the old steel mill foundations and toxic slag heaps left over from iron smelting. This place is marked for ‘urban renewal.’ Three locked layers of fence protect the vacant velodrome, despite George’s confidence that it’d be open. The racetrack is the first lonely triumph of those that would have the south shore of the city be inhabited by the types of people that make up the north shore: brave warriors of commerce. Competing groups have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to make this lakefront property great [again]. I pity the archaeology graduate students of the distant future, and the premises of their thesis papers: “Deadly Concrete: Why Ancient Americans Chose to Build on Lead-Infused Foundations.” There will be a marina, an organic grocery store, a private school, four trillion square feet of retail space, dog parks... The row houses of the area –some boarded up, others not– will all be razed. As is the custom in America, the original residents will be vaulted to the highest pinnacles of society, and lauded for their pioneering spirit, as we send them away to make some other frontier fashionable.

            All that remains and all that will remain of this ancient landscape are the giant red walls that run along a prehistoric shipping slip, in the heart of what was the center for American steel production. These walls, several thousand feet long, a couple dozen feet wide, and taller than anything within a mile, used to hold the raw iron ore brought down by ships from what are now ghost-infested mines surrounding Lake Superior. Too massive to be destroyed, there’s a spot where it looks like somebody tried and failed with dynamite. Instead they managed to make a crack that allows climbers to negotiate their way to the top. From this perch, with my bike resting below, I can touch elevated train tracks: a crane on rails used to work up here. It would lift the ore from the ships and put it in the space between the two walls. Then trains (first horse powered, then steam powered, then turbo-diesel-electric powered) would come to pick up as much as they could fit and schlep it over to the smelter. I think I can still smell a vague metallic odor mixed with the lake’s fishy scent. From the lakeshore I see Gary, Indiana, whose smokestacks still exhale flame, looking like a long black birthday cake.  Thousands of acres along Lake Michigan’s southern tip are now uninhabitable, marked by the poisonous scars of one industry or another. The great sand dunes of Indiana that blocked northern winds since the ice age are now glass, melted and spread thin across the world by the once thriving window industry; the apple orchards of Michigan are turning fallow in response to a changing climate; even the Lake is disappearing, flowing away out of the Chicago river, whose course was reversed during the era when the Silver Spay sunk –or the Lake would be draining, if it weren’t for excessive water runoff caused by the ever-expanding lakeside housing subdivision business and their pristine lawns, driveways, cul-du-sacs, and unhampered drainage.

I can see from where I stand, going on towards the horizon in every direction: empty lots and overgrown graveyards, rusting bridges and vacant docks. People lived, worked, and died here. They were experts in their trades. Their labors made Chicago one of the greatest cities on the continent. The poisonous land is their poltergeist, stuck in a cycle of warning to the next generation. In memory of these people, the lands they came from, and the land where their bodies now lay, the city has erected a statue at the foot of the great red wall. It’s an eight-foot-tall figure of a faceless man clutching a woman, with two faceless children standing at his feet. It’s made of bronze.

-->

-->