guide

Photo by Drew Gilliam on Unsplash

“However we are, we don’t know how to be another way, that’s the way we are!” 

David Byrne, on Here & Now

For the first of my four summers working on tour boats in Chicago, I was part of the crew. The early shift would arrive very, very early to hose down and scrub the two boats that would transport the tourists and local Chicago-geeks (and the people who love them too much to say no to a 90 minute cruise) for one or two routes through the city’s river and lakefront. The larger Fort Dearborn would meander up and down the three branches of the always green (not just in March) Chicago River for an introduction to the city’s architectural heritage, and the smaller Marquette would venture out through the locks onto Lake Michigan (You’re right, you really can’t see across it, I’d affirm for first time visitors whose definition of “lake” exploded upon encountering this longest and deepest of the Great Lakes) for a historical tour. The late crew took the ropes for later cruises, including the occasional evening booze cruise (they were always boozy), and did the day-end scrubdown and garbage haul. And the occasional sewage pump (which I typically avoided by offering to drop the dress uniforms at the dry cleaner).

In the 30 minutes (when we were on schedule) between tours, the two or three guys working the boat (usually 2, and it was always guys) would gather the trash left behind (there was always trash, and a lot of it, and most of it didn’t originate on the boat #justsayin), reset the plastic chairs with orderly and accommodating (and, if Captain Camilla was on duty, perfectly aligned) rows, refresh the water and iced tea dispensers, refill the cookie platters (and dutifully stash one away for each of us, especially if the peanut butter cookies were fresh), and get into place to welcome the next group. Captain Camilla took pride in our ever-diminishing turnaround time over the course of the summer (she’d start the stopwatch the moment the last passenger disembarked). During the heatwave (the one in 1995 when everyone died, remember that one?), we’d take turns running into the tour company’s office to take our shirts off and cool off for 5 minutes in the walk-in freezer with all the beer kegs before rushing back to greet the next sold-out tour (it was 105 degrees and 173% humidity, but they just kept coming).

Once folx boarded and got settled, the captain would take the mic to welcome people aboard and make the required safety announcement. Each captain would squeeze a big chunk of personality into their 2 minute pitch, making the same jokes, using the same cadence. I always liked Captain Skip’s greeting the most. After introducing himself and the crew on board, his tone would shift to one of shared disdain, like a cue to start rolling our eyes. “I have to inform you that the Coast Guard does require you that I do make this announcement.” I don’t know if all that extraneous language made people more aware of safety procedures, but it sure was endearing. Captain Skip was also the one friendliest to the crew. Unlike others who preferred solitude at the wheel, hanging out with Skip was welcome, as long as you didn’t talk too much. He’d give us turns at steering, and on slow days when tours were cancelled, he’d let us practice more difficult turns and pivots. Bits and pieces of his life came out along the way - his seasonal moves between Florida and Chicago, his bouts with alcoholism and recovery, his old wife, his observations about locals and tourists, his new wife. He was direct when we messed up, but his temper never flared. The only mean streak in his personality that I witnessed was directed at the one docent who treated the Captain and crew as their personal staff.

We called her Agent Orange. It wasn’t a kind name, but then again interactions with her weren’t characterized by kindness. She was white and naturally fairly pale, but before the summer even started, thanks to a few months in Florida and/or on a tanning bed, her grandkids could’ve pulled the Burnt Sienna crayon out of the box to draw her. Her hair was roughly the same shade, maybe a hint blonder, and her lipstick was, you guessed it, orange. Bright orange. She’d elbow us out of the way at the bottom of the embarkation ramp to greet people and again at the end to make sure she could sell a few copies of “her” book (she took all the photos, but, as one of my favorite docents, Phyllis, told us, she also plagiarized the content, including original research that Phyllis had integrated into her tour) and rake in the tips. At least twice every tour, Agent Orange would wave at whichever crew member was in her sight and snippily remind us to fetch her iced tea (which she never requested in the first place, and which really wasn’t our job), even though most docents would refill their thermoses before we left the dock. She frequently chastised whichever crew member was near for letting this man sit on a slightly bent chair or ignoring the piece of trash that that woman just dropped. Most days, we liked listening to the docents - we’d mimic the jokes they were about to drop, or laugh about a new factoid that made its way into the monologue - but with Agent Orange aboard, we’d do our best to ignore her, partly because her jokes were all stereotypes but mostly because she was the one docent who just made shit up and buried it under her, um, “charm.” But the worst part was that, at the end of Agent Orange’s day, the docent’s mic was a nasty mess of orange lipstick and spit (she held the mic to her mouth like it was a breathing apparatus).

One hot, sunny, sold-out August afternoon, Agent Orange called in sick, and the backup docent was stuck in traffic coming from the South Side. We stood around in a circle - Captain Skip, the office manager, and three of us crew members - to figure out what to do with the 200 passengers who were onboard, now 2 minutes to our scheduled departure. “Um, I could do it,” I said. All summer, I’d been listening to the rotation of docents, each with a different frame or focus. Want to know how many miles of telephone cable are in the Sears Tower? Phyllis could rattle off any obscure detail about any skyscraper in the city. Want the saucier, more tongue-in-cheek gossip about the city’s founders? Dan could tell a tale. Want to learn about the impact of good urban planning (and about the catastrophes that come with bad)? Jenny mingled politics, policy, and personalities into the phases of the city’s development. And Agent Orange? Well, her tours sure were colorful. But, while most of them talked about the distinct phases of architecture in Chicago, few connected visual cues to aesthetic philosophies or invited folx to focus on the relationship between context and design. Apparently I’d been developing my own script all summer while riding up and down the river with other docents in my ear, doing my own reading about the city’s history and major players (sometimes motivated by a desire to fact-check Agent Orange), and inviting myself into the lobbies of the buildings I’d cruise past on the Fort Dearborn to know what walking into the Lyric Opera or the Morton International felt like. “Yeah, I could do it.”

With Captain Skip’s nod of approval, the office manager ran inside to get me a clean shirt, the engines revved, and I filled a thermos of iced tea. I got a round of applause when Skip explained this was my first tour. If you know me, you probably know that it only takes a little bit of affirmation to unleash my inner ham. Hand me a microphone? Well...it’s showtime. As we pulled away from the dock, I laid out the four big phases we’d be talking about, told everyone I’d be talking about things on the right (I hated the way Agent Orange shifted from right to left or made the group turn around to see things she’d forgotten to talk about), and, as we passed under Columbus Drive and the Tribune, Jewelers’, Wrigley, and IBM buildings came into view, I felt a swell of pride and excitement, ready to make the tour mine. As we passed the Hyatt, I explained Mies van der Rohe’s vision for a city within a city and added, “And that’s where I had my senior prom.” I made about $20 in tips and got a lot of compliments from tourists who didn’t know they’d been duped with an understudy’s rookie performance, but the biggest affirmation came from Captain Skip who patted me on the shoulder and said, “That was pretty good. You’ll be better next time.” 

I spent the next three summers as a full-time docent. I shaped my own, distinct tour with a focus on the four major phases of Chicago’s architectural styles and an emphasis on seeing - and evaluating - buildings in context. I gushed about modern and postmodern innovations that irked more traditional lenses, knowing that only enthusiasm and persistence could get the haters to love, or at least respect, brutalism. I mean, come on. You can do anything with concrete. I was determined to convince each group that the IBM building is one of the most beautiful and graceful buildings in the world. I practiced and practiced pronouncing the names everyone needed to remember - the Potawatomi, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, Pere Marquette and Louis Joliet, Mies van der Rohe, Fazlur Khan. Most folx coming aboard expected an informative and entertaining 90 minutes, but I wanted them to be able to tell their family and friends all about the meaning behind the Chicago flag, the impact of Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and Jane Addams, and why New York wouldn’t be New York without Chicago. No, I emphasized, the nickname ‘the Second City’ does NOT mean ‘second to New York.’ I wanted them to see what I saw: a city that benefited from good planning; a city whose buildings told a story about preparing for, welcoming, and pursuing what’s next; a city whose story is a mosaic of insiders and outsiders, of the biggest of big money and the poorest of poor fools, of myths and realities about the American dream. With each tour, I floated down the river in awe of a city that asked all the questions the East Coast ignored and the West Coast refused to answer, of a city that sparked so many firsts and raced to avoid too many lasts, of a city whose segregated neighborhoods would be a model for pluralism, interdependence, and urban harmony. 

Did that city ever exist? Are any of its remnants extant? I’m not so naive to ignore the darker history of the city, of the people who were pushed further back by its establishment and trampled by its expansion, of the communities marginalized and ghettoized and set up to fight each other along lines of race, religion, and national origin, of the legacy of city bosses and corrupt politics, of the big, bigger, and biggest mistakes of mayors and alderpeople, of the violence that persists and the city’s failure (thanks in no small part to the increasingly conservative Supreme Court) to curb gun violence. But the job of the docent, the tour guide, the teacher, the journalist, the...well, any narrative-weaving role isn’t merely to present what is - it’s to plant seeds to recognize potential, imagine something better, and to make it happen. Some guides revel in this or that era of “glory days,” but, with 90 minutes with a captive audience and a microphone, I wanted people to believe that the past might be beautiful, but how we shape the future, how we keep what serves us and that delights us, how we shed what’s weighing us down or pitting us against each other, how we steward the resources we’ve gathered and how we rectify the injustices of the past - that’s what cities do, that’s what shapes our world, and that’s really what’s most amazing.