There’s an old steel mill smack dab in the middle of the North Side of Chicago, A. Finkl & Sons, which has been open since the late 1800s. It represents one of the last what was likely a slew of factories that sat along the north branch of the Chicago River before that section of town was redeveloped. Everything else along that stretch of Clybourn now has turned into a strip mall or condo buildings. The steel mill must still be turning one hell of a profit, because it hogs up acres of land that could easily be turned into tens of millions of dollars worth of real estate developments.

As much of an eye sore as it is, it’s kind of a neat thing to walk through at night in the summertime. If you go south on Southport straight through the complex you pass one of the pouring plants and you’ll notice they leave the building’s huge doors wide open. Almost every time I’ve walked past the place there have been a handful of onlookers — Lincoln Park or Bucktown residents out for a evening walk — watching in awe as flames and sparks fly while the massive melting pot does its work.

There’s also usually a handful of workers sitting outside taking a break, all of whom are tired and filthy beyond recognition. They look at you while you leisurely stand and stare in fascination at what is the bane of their grimy existence as if to say “If you think it’s so fucking neat, then why the fuck don’t you go in there and do it?”

The Trip: Denver vs. Chicago

We spent part of one night in Denver, and while one surely can’t base a town’s true essence on what it’s like after spending a handful of hours there, I can’t say that I was overwhelmed. It reminded me of Omaha, in some fundamental ways (the way it was laid out, the traffic, some of the modern architecture downtown). And considering I only know one person in Denver, I’m not even sure I’d enjoy living there more than Omaha. Half of what makes a town is how many friends you have there.

As with most cities in America, you have to drive pretty much everywhere, which is something I don’t miss at all. It would be tough for anybody who has lived in a town where you can depend on walking, biking and public transportation to go to a city where you have to worry about driving and parking. (I must note that Denver is drastically improving its public transportation system, but it didn’t seem so prevalent that you could live there comfortably without a car.)

We walked around the 16th St. Mall district, which was a fair attempt at creating an outdoor urban shopping area that cuts through one main strip of downtown (and takes you straight to Coors Field, where the Rockies play). Except pretty much everything in it had been built in the past ten years and was sorely lacking any original, regional specific shops or restaurants. It stuck me as an area of town not many people that actually lived in Denver hung out at (Em said she almost never went there when she lived in Denver.)

I kept thinking of Division St. (my street in Chicago) and how in many ways it (and many other streets in Chicago) is a template for how many post-modern cities attempt to design a contemporary urban shopping strip. Except almost nothing on Division is a franchise of any sort (the glaring exceptions being Jimmy John’s and Starbucks — which are omnipresent even in Chicago). It’s pretty neat knowing you live in an area that represents one of the last living representations of what most American cities used to look like. Back when a neighborhoods and towns reflected the members of the community: when the people that ran the neighborhood bar, bakery and deli actually lived in the neighborhood.

Corner after corner in this mall we approached pockets of thuggish-looking young black men standing around, being mildly obnoxious. Sadly, the first thought that ran into my mind was “What are all these black people doing downtown?” Just as I caught myself thinking that it occurred to me why I was: Because Chicago is so segregated I simply wasn’t used to it.

Bear with me here, I’m just trying to be honest.

Any Chicagoan will tell you that when you walk around downtown during the day, you don’t see groups of thuggish young black men standing around being mildly obnoxious. You especially don’t see them hanging around prominent shopping districts. You see people coming and going from work and bona fide rogue homeless people panhandling, but barely anything in between. I’m not saying this is a good thing, I’m just saying that’s what it looks like.

It occurred to me today coming back from lunch why that’s probably the case in Chicago. Walking past the fire station on Michigan Ave. I saw a cop forcing a homeless black man on the street — a man who didn’t appear to be doing anything other than sitting there — to get up and move somewhere else.

(Also, just before I saw the cop asking this man to leave, there was another guy on the corner panhandling his ass off. “C’mon, all you people got your sodas, your ice cream, you coffee … and I ain’t got nothing. Won’t you help me out a little bit? I want some ice cream or a soda, too!” Just as we passed him I looked to my buddy Nick. “I wonder if that guy sees the causal relationship between the fact that we have libations in our hands and we’re walking to and from our jobs,” I asked.)

Now before Al Sharpton holds a press conference accusing me of insinuating that it’s only black people who loiter and solicit on public streets, I should note that we also passed packs of young white gutter punks. They were digging through trash bins on the busy street and eating discarded food straight out of them right in front of everybody. That, by far, was the most disgusting thing I saw while I was in Denver.

The Trip: Part II

Which brings me to the funniest/most eye-opening story of the trip. Later that same day, after a big day of hiking, we wanted a good sit-down dinner. We drove around the outskirts of Estes in search of something that looked at least mediocre, yet found nothing, so we decided to head out of the mountains and into Loveland, which was about 30 miles away.

We didn’t have a map with us, so of course we wind up making a wrong turn that takes us out into aforementioned desolate housing division where people must never leave there homes (because we went about 10 miles through dense housing without seeing a gas station, grocery store or restaurant). We made our way back in town and headed out towards I-25 hoping that would yield at least something. It was getting late and we’d already pretty much relegated the dining experience to a chain of some sort. But the one that we were forced to (because it was the only one that was open) was quite hilarious considering the circumstances: Old Chicago. Here I am in Colorado, trying to get away from the city — away from pizza, pasta and plasma screens — and I wind up at a watered down rendition of what many of the bars in the very city I’m trying to get away from look like.

While this moment was tragically comical, it also shed a clear light on why chains are so prevalent there and many places in America (often touristy ones): Because we know what we’re going to get at them. And this isn’t always a bad thing. Case in point, the salad and nachos we had at Old Chicago were surely better than the ones we would have had at some locally-owned place in Estes. And the beer selection wouldn’t have been anywhere close.

In many ways the blame for the escalation of restaurant chains in America should lay on the shoulders of many of the locally owned joints, because they simply aren’t as good. I mean, in Chicago, that’s not the case — you sometimes have to go out of your way to find a franchise in this place. But Chicago is one of the culinary gems of all of North America. You go to a place like Loveland, Colorado or even my hometown of Council Bluffs, Iowa (were there’s less than a dozen independently run restaurants, almost all of which are poorly run) and people are gonna go to Applebee’s and Cracker Barrel instead. This is because the quality of food and service is almost always more consistent. Same thing with Starbucks, for instance. The brilliance of Starbucks’ scheme is that everything with that company is so regimented — all the way from the ingredients, from how they make the drinks and how they present them — that people know what they’re going to get almost every single time. The Carmel Machiato you order in New York will likely taste the same as they the one you order in Des Moines. If you go to most independent coffee shops, the quality and contents of you drink and the service that comes with it depends mostly what the particular barista that’s working that day. Sometimes that’s good. Sometimes that’s bad. And when it’s bad you could possibly lose a customer forever. Starbucks, in all their ridiculousness, usually doesn’t let that happen. Apparently, neither does Old Chicago, cause the meal I had there, while it wasn’t necessarily transcendent, was pretty fucking good. (Sadly enough, it was likely the best meal of the whole trip — beer included.

So as I sat there munching on a Cobb Salad, sipping an import beer, watching baseball highlights on a plasma screen, listening to bad 90s juke box music, wondering why it was we had to drive 30 miles outside of the mountains to get a good meal, I realized that restaurant chains do have their place in society. And in some cases it’s not that bad of one.

The Trip: Part I

Disclaimer: I just got back from a brief vacation with my girlfriend in Colorado this week, so I’m going to break away from the Chicago theme for these next few entries. (Though in the end, I suppose I do tie in a Chicago theme).

Obviously, we chose Colorado for the mountains. I wanted to get away from the city for a couple days and Em wanted to go back to her old stomping grounds (she used to live in Denver). All in all, it was a great trip. We got a lot of cool things done in a short amount of time, an as vacations usually go, it went too fast.

While the front range of the Rockies is still one of my favorite places in the country, I was struck by the rapid development of the area and how much it lacked the sort of western/frontier panache I remember it having when I visited as a kid.

For those of you who haven’t been there recently, urban sprawl is gobbling up almost every acre it can from Fort Collins to Denver, and likely even south to Colorado Springs (though we didn’t go there). Heading north from Denver to Boulder, you pass a seemingly endless belt of strip malls. To use an Omaha reference point, it looks like clusters of Village Point malls stacked next to one another for miles on end. Each are filled with chains like Outback Steakhouse, Ruby Tuesday, AMC Theaters, Cheesecake Factory, Gap, Old Navy and lots and lots of banks. All ensuring that your experience out won’t be any different from say, the outskirts of Kansas City, Minneapolis or just about any other town in America.

In search of a place to eat one night (I’ll explain more later) Em and I decided to head to Loveland, a town that appears to be expanding as fast as any in the area. We wound up taking a wrong turn and drove through mile after mile of bland suburb … take that back, these suburbs were downright ugly. The houses and divisions all looked exactly the same. So much so that I’m surprised people who live there don’t mistakenly go to the wrong house every now and again. And of course, being in a barren part of Colorado, there isn’t a tree to be found: Just rows and rows of identical houses with empty brown yards.

As we drove passed we both wondered who the fuck would want to live in such a mundane environment. It made me depressed just thinking about the possibility.

This was all mostly disappointing for me because I remember the area having such a rustic mystique about it: Driving through it all as a kid I was able to conjure up visions of what it might have looked like when frontiersman, cowboys, Indians roamed and old saloons and ranches sat amidst the plains and foothills. It’s almost impossible doing that when there’s a new housing division being built in just about every place that you can physically fit one. Everything east of the mountains reminded me of West Omaha, the only difference being the vista.

Of course, once you get in the mountains they’re still as majestic as ever. That section of the Rockies is the personal favorite of all the mountain ranges I’ve seen and that includes Yellowstone, Glacier, the Canadian Rockies and everything I saw while living in Idaho. Rocky Mountain National Park has gone out of its way to preserve its original landscape, to the point to where they’ve pretty much taken down every man made structure ever built on its grounds not directly associated with the park service. The only issues is that, being such awesome park, it draws truckloads of tourists. You have to get pretty deep into it to truly feel isolated. Most of the hikes you go on there you’re within shouting distance of another human.

We stayed in Boulder one night, a town that, not unlike the areas surrounding it, is becoming more and more developed each year. The downtown area, which used to be filled with unique record, book and clothing stores and a slew of cool college bars, is now being overrun with new multi-use developments with a hiking gear chain or a Starbucks on the retail level and million dollar condos on the top. Sure, there were lots of hippies, yippies and vagabonds lounging about— as is usual with the hyper liberal town — but according to my buddy who’d been living there for ten years, the place was really starting to lose the very edge the majority of its transplants moved there to enjoy.

For the other two nights we stayed in Estes Park, a town that has managed to turn itself almost completely into a cheesy tourist trap for rednecks from across the country. (In all fairness, it could have been that way when I was there ten years ago and I just didn’t recognize it since I was sort of one of them at the time). If we could go back and do it all over again, we likely would have just stayed three nights in Boulder or one or two in Denver, because Estes had little to offer other than its proximity to the main entrance to Rocky Mountain National, which was where we wanted to spend most of our time.

We searched and searched for a respectable place to eat lunch our first day there and after walking through the whole town, ended up at some lousy café were I ate a $9 turkey wrap I could have made better at home. For some reason a preponderance of restaurants there were Italian, which I thought was a tad ridiculous. Who the fuck comes to the mountains and wants to eat Italian? Gimme some steak, pork, beans, corn bread. I can eat fettuccini all I want in Chicago. I came to the mountains for some old west comfort food for fucks sake.