Most inner suburbs really aren’t that different from the outskirts of Chicago. Oak Park, Niles, Skokie, Cicero: While all have a distinct character, both from the city and from each other, it is an essentially urban character. But travel west of the Des Plaines River, and things change. It is as if the psychic pull on a people corresponds to the continental drift, that all the land that drains into Lake Michigan has one orientation, while the land draining into the Illinois River (and eventually the Mississippi River then the Gulf of Mexico) has another. In short, my new home of Villa Park sometimes feels like it was carved out of farm country, even though most of the town has been around since the 1920’s and is firmly enmeshed in the Chicago grid.
A lot of folks have asked me about what it’s like living in the suburbs. Now, I know that these questions are made mostly out of politeness, along with maybe a little hope that I might dish on some of the absurdities of the suburban lifestyle that I’ve encountered, but I also figure that there is at least a little genuine curiosity behind some of them. Over the past three months, I’ve gotten acquainted with our new town while still having that sense of otherness that goes with being an outsider. So I thought that I’d use this year-end missive to summarize my findings (with the understanding that, while I may aim to be a Margaret Mead on the Prairie, most of my insights are probably more like an admixture of the venom of Philip Wylie with the platitudes of Rick Steves).
Villa Park, much like the city’s Northwest Side where we previously lived, is a bastion of the white working class. While integration has come to both places, they remain very much expressions of an old working class sensibility. There is a real sense of everyone taking care of their neighbors, but also an unspoken understanding that everyone will get down to the business of keeping the place in order, of not letting their neighbors down.
We are one house off the corner, and the odd angle of that corner means that we share a front yard with one of our neighbors, whose name is Bob. On the day we moved in, before most of our stuff was even out of its boxes, Bob came over and noted that typically he and the owner of our house share lawn mowing duties. Two days after that, Bob was out, dressed in a thick flannel shirt and an old hunting cap, mowing our lawn, even though the grass looked perfectly nice to me. I had to tell him that my lawnmower was a piece of junk, that I didn’t move it from the old house, and that it was October already and I wasn’t really planning on mowing the lawn again until spring.
Out here, a person’s yard is an act of personal expression, but there are a limited subset of acceptable ways that this self should be expressed. This is not the kind of neighborhood that looks kindly on unkempt lawns. Nor is it the kind of place where folks pay others to do the yard work for them, although I did notice one house about halfway up the block that has yard service. But in general, it is just assumed that people will do these kinds of domestic tasks themselves. At one point, I told Nancy, one of the neighbors on the other side of us, that we were thinking about getting a housekeeping service to clean our place a couple of times each month, and her jaw dropped so low that I thought she was going to catch flies. It was like I had just told her that I had hired a personal manservant to help clean my private parts. I imagined her thinking, “What kind of yuppie debutantes do we have moving in here?”
Our block is a friendly place. Most folks say “hi” to anyone who walks by. The neighbors on either side of us each bought little Christmas presents for our 17-month old son. All our immediate neighbors have a little post-Christmas get-together each year, and Bob is hosting this year’s party, this coming Sunday. So, it’s a very neighborly place. But then so was our block on the Northwest side. From my experience, that’s just how these working class neighborhoods are.
In this sense, I am instinctively much more comfortable here than I would be in, say, Evanston or Naperville, two of the many suburbs for which I admit having what amounts to an irrational dislike.
Naperville is pretty easy to dismiss as the star child of planned suburbs, a place where the city fathers have somehow managed to maintain its image as a rural haven while becoming the fifth largest city in the state, a place where many of the fancy downtown Chicago restaurants have set up satellites, with the added benefit that the homeless are not welcome there, a place where you can have your cul-de-sac monstrosity with attached garage to keep your Sequoia nice and warm yet still eat overpriced linguine and swing with the neighbors on the weekend.
Evanston is a somewhat different story. It is the kind of town to which a lot of urban bohemians flee when, like us, they have kids and are looking for a bigger home, as Evanston has the requisite bookstores, cafes, and art movie houses to keep them in touch with the aspects of contemporary culture that have become defining parts of their identity. I actually had a short debate with extended family at the Christmas dinner table over my idea that Evanston is a pretty insufferable place. My argument, in a nutshell, is that the town was founded back in the 19th century by teetotaling Methodists as a refined refuge from the hustle-bustle of Chicago, and that everything about its development, from its lack of expressway access to its beaches, where city residents are not welcome, reeks of the kind of North Shore privilege that makes me want to punch someone. To me, the current residents, all these pseudo-bohemians, drinking fair trade coffee and feeling good about themselves, are really the contemporary equivalent of the uptight folks who originally founded the town. Hey, I know a fair number of otherwise fine and decent people who decided to move there, and I don’t begrudge them this, to each his own utopia, but living in a town like that would raise my blood pressure by at least 20 points.
Villa Park, on the other hand, is pretty much a creation of the Greater Chicago working class. Founded in the 1920’s around the Ovaltine factory, the housing stock is a mix of comfy 1920’s Queen Anne and Tudor homes (like the one we recently moved into), 1950’s ranch houses and bi-levels (like the kind my sister-in-law just bought), and post-WWII apartment complexes. The Ovaltine factory itself, which had been vacant since the company moved its operations to Minnesota in the 1980’s, was recently turned into relatively upscale condos.
Villa Park’s shopping pleasures trace mostly to its working class roots, and foremost amongst these joys are the pleasures of drink. I can walk to a handful of local watering holes, including the ubiquitous Irish pub with good beer and tolerable food, along with Lunar Brewing, a great brew pub that features not only its own first rate suds but also most of my favorite beers on the planet on tap, from European imports to Midwest microbrews, almost all for $4.50/pint. Up on North Avenue, about a three-minute drive away, there is Chicagoland Winemakers, which not only sells everything you need to brew or ferment your own elixir, but also makes its own stash of home brew on the premises, which after throwing a couple of hints you’ll usually be offered to try. I can vouch for their first-rate pilsner, a relatively hard beer to brew at home due to its low fermenting temperature and a crisp taste that can’t hide any off flavors. I also like the fact that the husband-and-wife team who own the place are direct and courteous but don’t kiss any ass. There is no pretense of them being extra nice to you just because you are giving them your money. And right across the street from the winemakers shop, up against Salt Creek, is the Golden Pheasant, with a biker bar up front and a supper club in back, reminiscent of small town Wisconsin. The German food they serve is quite decent, and on Sunday they feature a buffet of homemade desserts, including some of the most awesome sugar cookies on the planet.
The shopping area on Villa Avenue south of St. Charles Road is just a five minute walk from our home and features the kind of quirky stores that tend to congregate in dilapidated downtowns. There is Pioneer Garden & Feed, which specializes in bird feeders and where, if business is slow, one of the owners will give you a short dissertation about anything from the local forest preserves to how to attract birds to your home. The Rampant Lion is just down the block from Pioneer Garden & Feed. Most of the small storefront is devoted to folk CD’s and Celtic trinkets, although I’m intrigued by the bagpipe classes they have every Wednesday night. The mini-mall at Villa and St. Charles includes a butcher shop, a bakery, a coffee house, and a used bookstore housing mostly old paperback mystery novels and pulp science fiction. Other than the butcher shop, none of these places ever seems to be doing much business, raising the question of how they pay their rent each month, let alone find the cash to pay their employees. But that is the great thing about a neglected old downtown: the place is so sleepy and I assume the rent is so comparatively minimal that it allows the space for small, quirky businesses to open up shop and survive, if not thrive.
Tucked between the hustle-bustle of Oak Brook and the cut-rate emporiums on North Avenue, downtown Villa Park remains an odd backwater, at least in part due to the history of its train lines. Originally, four rail lines ran through town, mostly to transport goods and raw materials to-and-from Chicago. Two of these rails, the Great Western freight line, which ran right by the old Ovaltine factory, and the old Elgin passenger line, have long since been decommissioned, and both have been turned into extended bike trails, where you can ride from the inner suburbs all the way out into farm country. The two remaining rail lines, the Union Pacific and Canadian National tracks, both of which are within a few hundred yards of our home, are still actively used, and it is not unusual to see 100+ car trains rolling on the tracks near our house.
Eighty years ago, the Elgin line was the main transportation node to get out of town. When the Elgin line shut down, the Union Pacific became the only line with passenger rail service in Villa Park, and the train station was moved to what had been the backside of town. As a result, Villa Park is one of the few suburbs that does not have a commercial business district abutting their Metra station, while its old downtown lacks the accompanying foot traffic and is somewhat stranded.
I’ve always gravitated to the working class. I just feel more comfortable around them. This dates all the way back to high school. If I told you that I grew up in Newport Beach, California, you’d probably imagine some kind of fancy house on the ocean. Well, there are parts of Newport Beach that are like that, but we lived in the “heights”, a plateau about a mile away from the water (as the crow flies), a neighborhood of cute, California bungalows, mostly built between 1945 and 1960, homes not that different from the ranches and bi-levels of north Villa Park.
In high school, the two kids in my class who lived nearest to me were Ivan Kovalenko, who lived a block away, and Alex Olson, who lived the next block over. Both grew up in small bungalows and were being raised by single mothers who didn’t have a lot of spare cash. Along with Eric Hesse a few blocks over, whose Chilean father worked as an electrical engineer while investing all his spare money in local real estate, they were the closest I had to good friends as a teenager. To be honest, we really weren’t that close, but they were nonetheless a significant part of my life. The first few times I got drunk were with Alex, and it was at his house that I first heard the Sex Pistols (some skateboarding friend of ours brought “Never Mind the Bollocks” by one afternoon). What I remember best about Ivan is that he used to like challenging me to wrestling and/or boxing matches, where he would ritually kick my ass (it helps being 30 pounds bigger and raised by two older brothers). But there was an unspoken bond, in that we had none of the gifts of the guys growing up on the waterfront, neither the cash and the confidence of the Lido kids nor the hip flair of the surfer dudes from West Newport. We weren’t very good athletes and only adequate students. We were all rather awkward around girls. What we had were the things that most working class kids have, a willingness to push the envelope and our love of rock ’n roll.
To be strictly factual, my dad was a real estate broker in Southern California and not a factory worker in the Midwest, and there were some years when he made a lot of money. But there were others where he made nothing, and we lived off my mother’s teaching salary. Which means that we never struggled, but also that we never had the rather ridiculous prosperity of the families down on the water. So I guess, strictly speaking, you would probably label my family upper-middle class, but I hung with the working class kids because they were my neighbors. And I think those associations have shaped me to this day.
This has presumably influenced why I feel so at home in Villa Park. Now, don’t get me wrong. Once I get on the main suburban drag, I often feel like a beached sea creature, or maybe a whale trapped in the shallows, awaiting the inevitable harpoon. For instance, I refer to the intersection of Butterfield and Finley Roads as Shithole Central. Every crappy concept restaurant in the corporate firmament seems to have landed in this blighted moonscape: Red Lobster and The Olive Garden, of course, but also the Jimmy Buffet-inspired Cheeseburger in Paradise and something called “Fudruckers” (what you’d serve at a place called “Fudruckers” is beyond me, but I assume it’s another corporate concept, and I’m sure it’s ruckin fun). One Friday night not long after moving here, I got the brilliant idea that we would follow up some remarkably bad Thai food we got at a mini-mall on Roosevelt Road with a quick visit to the Verizon store, situated within the 4th circle of one of these big Butterfield malls. I just assumed that the store would be relatively empty that late on a Friday night, but we could barely navigate the traffic jam in the parking lot, and once I was inside the store I was then asked to “put my name on the list” if I wanted to speak with a representative. The store was full of people, encompassing a wide gamut of Chicago’s diversity. Just about every age, every shape, every ethnicity was represented in this room, all united by the pleasures of a full belly followed by the prospect of conspicuous consumption. I quickly drew two conclusions: first, that the U.S. economy really couldn’t be doing that badly; and second, that this kind of life is fucking crazy. This was quickly followed by a third thought: Get me out of here! I would much rather spend my Friday night hanging out with my wife and son at home, without a new cell phone.
And that, my friends, is why I like my suburban life. I’ve gotten to the point where I really don’t need all that crap, the latest phone or culturally significant book, to be happy. In fact, I’ve still got a bunch of old, unread texts gathering mold on my bookshelf that could fill my time for the next 20 years. But I like my yard, I can play music in my basement until the wee hours without disturbing the rest of the family, and I like being within easy access of the dog park for my Schip and an indoor pool for my son. If I can also walk down the street and enjoy a nice IPA, so much the better.
Labels: Chicagoland, suburbia, Villa Park
