Not the guy from the story.
I was “downtown” photographing situations that make it hard to walk (hard to be a pedestrian) on Sunday, November 13, 2011. While waiting for the light at LaSalle and Adams, a man wearing a Bears jersey in the front passenger seat of a taxicab asked me if I had pizza in my Yuba Mundo’s Go-Getter bag.
“No”, I said, adding, “It has my backpack in there”.
“It’s a very large bag”, he replied.
Realizing that he was sober and that we could hold a conversation, I explained, “It holds a lot of groceries”.
“Oh, you live downtown”, he ascertained.
Not quite. “I live a few miles outside of downtown”.
The light turned green and the driver moved on, but the guy left me with, “Have a nice day”. I said, “You, too”.
After I got home and was looking through my photos and recounted this story, I realized that to him, “downtown” meant the entire City of Chicago. To me, downtown meant the Loop community area and some surrounding blocks. I might define “downtown” as a place bounded by Kennedy, Division, Lake Michigan, and Roosevelt. But to this suburban football fan, downtown is that big place that one has to travel a ways to get to. I remembered that I had the same understanding of downtown when I lived in Batavia, Illinois, a suburb 40 miles west of Chicago. You can access it by driving on I-290 and I-88, or by taking the Metra UP-West line to Geneva.
There’s at least one other assumption I can make from this conversation: If I shop for and carry groceries on a bicycle, I must live in Chicago; people in the suburbs are never seen shopping for and carrying groceries on a bicycle.
Another photo from my photo mission on Sunday. It’s Roosevelt University’s vertical campus building on Wabash and Van Buren.