Chicago from a different set of eyes.

[This view of Chicago comes by way of brilliant, perfect, single, studly DanH. He gives a postcard picture of the Chicago he saw in a summer visit this past August. -CS]

I once read a novel in which one of the principal characters, a university lecturer from Kansas, reflected that the main reason he was un-American was that he loved trains. He had chosen to live in India, that most journeying of nations, and loved the fluidity, the mobile camaraderie and temporary society, of a string of carriages pulled by a groaning engine. He mused that his native land, with its emphasis upon individual choice and freedom, was both more suited to the dynamism of the car and more static as a result. There is something liberating about the automobile, but there is something more romantic and enduring about the step-on step-off bustle of the train. America, the lecturer concluded, had chosen the guarded privacy, the obsessive freedom, of the sealed and controlled car and had thus consigned itself to an insular, impersonal, and altogether grayer existence.

Well, Chicago was built on the tracks.

Like all tracks, the ones on which Chicago grew had two sides: the Working City's stolid, bluecollar tradition and the swirling, neon-lit decadence of its Capones and Giancanas. That tension still exists today. The visitor to Chicago, the green tourist of Americana in its urban incarnation, will be attracted - will be directed - towards Michigan Avenue and the Hancock Building, towards Saks or Sears. They will be encouraged to take a ride in a horse-drawn carriage and listen to narration about the city's glorious past, its famous and, more interestingly, its infamous sons and daughters. There will be cafes and clubs and there will be arty kids playing trendy rock in tastefully furnished, and exclusively patroned, bars. There will be an artificial beach.

But a ride on the CTA takes them to the grit of Chicago, to its cogs and neo-Victorian brick. The forbidding quasi-Gothic architecture of the Tribune building is here replaced by the communal practicality of the front stoop. Bloomingdale's is replaced by Target, the Apple Store by Best Buy. Subway stays. Here, people stand still more often. They smile more often, too. Things feel at once more comfortable and less predictable out here, as if real life only begins somewhere eastsouthwest of the Magnificent Mile. Here is where the bluecollar tradition comes alive - here is where the city is born. In the suburbs live the people who drive into downtown to buy a throw for their leather sofa. That is Sinatra's Chicago. Eastsouthwest of the
Esplanade lives the City of Big Shoulders. These people are connected to Michigan Avenue by the train.

I was fortunate enough to see both of these Chicagos - unlike many a tourist, I lived in Rogers Park for a week and explored the city's headier attractions from that base. I like to think that this gave me a different perspective to the average international visitor, and to some extent I have evidence for this minor conceit: I have travelled the States, mainly the south, as a harried tourist many times, and visited any number of smaller American cities ... and do not feel I have the same grasp of them that I do of the Windy. Which is not to say I *understood* Chicago in its entirety. Not at all.

I am English. It is a peculiarity of English society that a new accent and dialect crops up at intervals roughly equivalent to every city block. It may have something to do with our Germanic need to classify, but more crucially this separation of people translates into the urban geography of our cities. The only megalopolis we have to compare to Chicago is, of course, London - our other cities are provincial towns by comparison. But London, it is often said, is not so much a city as it is a collection of villages - of a Camden here and a Bayswater there, then a Covent Garden over in that corner and a Kensington in this. Each of these 'villages' has its own distinctive feel, even its own special architecture. It is not just evident when emerging, blind, from the subterannean public transport hamster tunnel that is the Tube - it's possible to walk between one village and the next and observe the sudden but undeniable shift.

Despite Chicago's special reputation as a city of two particular sides, this was a phenonemon I failed to observe whilst there.

It could be that, as a visitor with no clue as to what precisely delineates American neighbourhoods, I simply missed the signs. But, it seemed to me, the closest Chicago gets to this stark villagisation is the complexion of a neighbourhood's residents - Jewish in Skokie, Asian in Naperville. There is something of the American in this - English cities have grown over centuries, and reflect this organic expansion in their haphazard and disconnected topology. American cities were erected quickly and seamlessly, and each time a neighbourhood was added to them it was added so as to fit that first initial spurt of frenzied construction. They are as a result more architecturally unified, if often socially more stratified. Chicago, I think, is no exception.

At the same time, however, the city is far different to any other American experience I have had. Much is made of the concept of the Independent Republic of New York City, but Chicago felt in many ways as separate as the Big Apple is reputed to be. Travelling the south, you don't hear on the radio what you hear in Chicago. Travelling almost anywhere else in the US, you simply do not get a public transport system as coherent as the CTA - for an Englishman bred on the idea that nowhere is too far away as long as you can find a train station or a bus-stop, I was in public transport heaven. Chicago felt airier and less oppressive than many cities I've visited - its wide boulevards are almost Parisian and even the tallest of its skyscrapers do not seem to close in on your personal space as they do in Dallas or
Jacksonville. There is nothing of the claustrophobic asthma of London in Chicago. It is liberating. It is liberal.

There is also something defiantly midwestern and down-to-earth about the city - even the Magnificent Mile is clandestinely hectoring, "Hey, you - yeah, you - shouldn't you be watching the Bears? Put that diamond watch down." I appreciate this. Pretension is not an attractive feature for a city, and Chicago is mostly without it. But seven days is not enough to know a city the size of this one.

I did not understand whether or not the river cleaves Chicago in two as it does London.

I didn't understand which parts of Chicago were the nice parts and which the seedy, as I did instinctively in El Paso.

I could not discern what made a Chicagoan a Chicagoan - what part of the city's many unique features conjured allegiance from ether ... and decided that it must therefore be birth. This makes Chicago an exclusionary city in that most defiant and protective of bluecollar ways.

I'm not sure I got a feel for Chicago's people. Perhaps this was because I didn't meet enough of them. In fact, no, it *was* because I didn't meet enough of them. This is the nature of the beast - it is the anonymity of the modern city at work, and Chicago is many things but not, perhaps, the most communal of settlements.

And I couldn't tell you what number bus to get for North Sheridan.

But I kept a journal whilst in the city, and one day I wrote this: "I understand Chicago. I think it understands me." I meant this in the most vague, esoteric of ways. It is beyond the seven days of my visit to truly come to grips with a city the size of Chicago, but I felt something in this conurbation of obscene spread with which I immediately connected. I am a city boy. I had spent more than three weeks travelling largely rural areas. When I arrived in Chicago, I had experienced a couple of pretty bad days. This city was, to me, like balm.

Chicago is a city with the potential to be as brutishly lonely as any other, but I thought I felt something in its bars and stores and streets. I thought I felt a kind of workaday welcome, the kind that behooves a city built to the tune of migration. It is big, it is loud, and it is imposing. But, at root, Chicago is perhaps that rarest of cities: one that actually *likes* people, rather than just entertains them.

And you can see it all by train.