The household vessels and our homeland’s gods.’ We both shall share one danger, one salvation…. ‘Come then, dear father, mount upon my neck Aeneas tells how, after the Greeks have emerged from their treacherous horse and are laying waste to the city, he flew home from the slaughter to carry his father and lead his family from the burning city: In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas flees Troy with his father and son and eventually lands in Italy to found “the Latin race and the ramparts of high Rome.” During his travels to Italy, Aeneas rests in Carthage, where, during Book II, he recounts the fall of his city to the Carthaginian Queen Dido. More than even the Italian colors, these tiny devotionals evoke the people who, according to Virgil, supposedly established the Roman line-the Trojans. In addition to the proud flags, most homes on the street also feature melancholy votives shrines in the front yards-some to the Virgin Mary, or the nativity-but also to St. Under the layers of proud paint, however, is the sense that these hidden blocks have been choked off by the transportation arteries on all sides, and the dwindling residents are desperate to maintain their besieged keep. Certainly there is an element of “preserving the old neighborhood” involved in these streets off 26th Street (mentioned so prominently during the Family Secrets trial), especially since discarded packs of cigarettes with Mandarin characters clutter the gutters. It seems the Italian inhabitants here want to make it clear they are holding firm to their tiny homeland. Plastic picnic flags in Italian colors are strung between the trees, and the trees themselves-along with basketball poles, benches, and even fire hydrants-are painted red, white and green. Almost all of these homes-and the blocks they inhabit-are festooned with Italian-American markers. Even though front stoops are shaded by the expressway and backyard decks seem to slide into the Stevenson on-ramp, this neighborhood features broad driveways sculpted ornamental evergreen shrubs rusty, inoperative security cameras. The majority are built in a sort-of 1970s near-suburbs style, as though they were intended for Hickory Hills or Schiller Park but fell off a flatbed transporting them on the expressway. Most of the homes in this residential triangle seem even more misplaced than their neighborhood. Jude was wrapped in a blue cloak both brilliant and stern, with the words “Pray for Us” painted on a golden background. The expressway ramps soar above, residents hunker underneath, and in the soot and debris, St. West, an embankment of freight train lines 70-yards-wide block this area off and are only transversable by dank, dark viaduct passages. To the east, the chasm of the Dan Ryan-the world’s busiest expressway-flows south from its headwaters. These three-odd blocks are surrounded on all sides by major transportation arteries: To the immediate north, the gully of the Stevenson Expressway, wider than the Chicago River at its fullest. Beneath his beatific head, under the concrete and steel pillars of the overpass, sit a few blocks seemingly lost to progress. Jude’s mournful mien gazed down the passing traffic. As I-90-94 swerved west to meet the interstate exchanges around the Loop, St. Jude, patron of lost causes, met every north-bound driver entering the center of Chicago via the Dan Ryan Expressway.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |