All Gone to Look for America Page 11

  What I was not prepared for was to be sitting barely a few hours later on the upper deck of a restaurant shaped like a steamship sipping a piña colada and watching girls in skimpy bikinis play beach volleyball on golden sand against an ocean of clear blue water.

  ‘Ocean’, of course, is something of an exaggeration, but believe me it does not feel like it from the lower shore of Lake Michigan, with the far coast – in a straight line – more than 200 miles away. Lifeguards line the beach at regular intervals and when the trim tanned athletic bodies are not batting volleyballs to one another over nets on the sand they are keeping their shape by cycling or jogging along the shoreline.

  There is something almost Australian about the scene which makes me realise why the Americans joined with our antipodean cousins to get beach volleyball included as an Olympic sport. The rest of us may have happily approved if only for the spectator value, but not without a lingering suspicion that it was more about voyeurism than actual sport. I can’t help suspecting it won’t be quite the same at the 2012 games in London where they intend to cover Horseguards’ Parade with sand, so we can huddle together with our brollies up watching shivering girls in tracksuits cavorting in the rain.

  In any case my own interest is, of course, purely academic. Not least because I am sitting here next to my wife. This is not quite the surprise it might appear to be. She had planned for some time one of her biannual business trips to the US including a visit to contacts in Chicago, partly because it fitted in with my itinerary but also because we could visit her cousin Helen who lives here, ‘and you simply must see her kitchen’. I know, I know, but we’ll get there. Anyhow I am obviously pleased to see her, not least because it means I get to exchange my usual ‘Motel 6’ style accommodation for two nights in the opulent 1920s splendour of the Drake Hotel, whose great bulk looms behind us overlooking the beach – even if it did take the bellboys a moment or two to decide to let this rucksack-toting old buffer in frayed denims through the door; but who are they to object if the paying customer likes a bit of rough?

  So here we are improbably sipping tropical cocktails just south of the Canadian border on the last day of September, with the temperature a blissful 26 degrees Celsius (or 79 Fahrenheit as the natives would have it), with the edge taken off the heat by a gentle version of the omnipresent inshore breezes that make this the ‘Windy City’.

  Looking out in one direction, as the cheery Italian-American waiter serves burgers with ‘spicy fries’ (chips dusted with chilli powder), I can see white sails of yachts dotted around the bay, a small circular nineteenth-century island fort – like the one in Portsmouth harbour, here no doubt intended to guard against marauding Brits from Canada – and the imposing bulk of a cruise liner rounding the headland. In the other: the stone bulk of the Drake against the striking modernist skyscrapers clustered around the elongated twin-horned pyramid of the John Hancock tower, the Sears Building’s rival for the title of Chicago’s most iconic structure.

  It is, in fact, quite beautiful in an austere sort of way, an almost perfect minimalist modernist prop for the organic activity on the beach in front of it. It also occurs to me that, for all people say about the view from the top of tall buildings, looking up can often be better than looking down (from up there the beach volleyball players would be mere specks). Nonetheless, we are going up. Not the Hancock but the Sears, for one simple reason: my past preference for the Empire State over the late World Trade Center in New York meant I have never been up the world’s tallest skyscraper. And as the Sears Building has currently regained that status at this very moment – I don’t count the CN Tower in Toronto which is merely an observation platform on a television mast – I’m not going to miss my fleeting chance. Fleeting because by the time this book comes out although the Sears Building will still be the tallest – if you take the rather risible measure of judging by the top of the antennae on the roof (527.3 metres) – the actual top floor (412 metres), where the observation deck is situated, will have been surpassed by the Shanghai World Financial Centre (492 metres) due to open late 2008, which in turn will almost immediately lose out to the Burj Dubai, a veritable Tower of Babel that will top out several hundred metres higher. This is, of course, all just ridiculous male penis-envy hubris as any woman will tell you, while checking the size of the wallet of the men who built them. Anyhow, pathetic or not, I’ve decided that if I’m in the city with the world’s tallest building right now, then I’ve got to go up it.

  What a mistake that is going to turn out to be. Not quite as big a mistake as that made by the two young Japanese tourists who stop us on the street on our way there. Would I take a photograph of them? No problem, and I take the neat little Olympus digital camera and frame the two of them side by side beaming happily. Make sure, he indicates by sign language, to get in the tallish building behind. So I oblige, kneeling down to include as much as possible of the maybe 50-storey high yellow-brick-faced apartment building behind them. Maybe it’s where they’re staying. I also get in the advert for the Sears Tower’s Skydeck Observation Platform. It’s only a few minutes later, as they acknowledge me with sheepish smiles in the ticket queue in the lobby of the glass and steel tower round the corner, do I realise they had misconstrued their monolith.

  Tall buildings have a hold on us. They draw us to their summits so we can look down and see how insignificant our fellow human beings – and of course ourselves, if we are in that sort of philosophical mood – really are. The best – though it is not particularly tall but still offers a panoramic view of a relatively low-rise city – is the Guinness Visitors’ Centre in Dublin. Not only does it offer a 360 degree view over the Dublin skyline, the building itself is shaped internally like a pint glass, has three bars on the way up and a bar at the centre of the circular top-storey observation room, where, what is more, you are rewarded with a free pint for getting that far.

  The people who run the Sears Tower nowadays – the original Sears Roebuck department store moved out some 16 years after it was completed back in 1974 – would do well to take a lesson. Not only do they not offer you a drink, they manage to deceptively conceal the length of the queue ahead of you by snaking it through a succession of rooms and corridors which I feel certain the Chicago Fire Department – a highly organised and much called-upon service – would immediately condemn as a potential death trap. This includes – just when you’re least expecting it – a wholly superfluous auditorium film presentation on the tower’s construction. Maybe they feel they are giving value for money, but frankly, even the genuinely jaw-dropping views to be had from the top barely excuse a wait of nearly an hour – much more in peak periods – crammed into a sweaty basement.

  There are, understandably, security checks to be gone through, though these are disconcertingly perfunctory. The only thing I hadn’t been expecting and which takes me aback is when a man in an official yellow T-shirt insists on taking my photograph. I know passport officers do this now on entry to the country, but are they really going to match them up with pictures of everyone who goes up the Sears Tower?

  ‘Check it out when you come back down, sir. No obligation to buy,’ and he points to a photograph of a perfect American family displaying their perfectly straight cosmetically whitened teeth against a Chicago skyline and an azure sky. Wonderful! There you have it: captured forever on a silicon chip, the perfect memory of the scene you haven’t seen yet.

  A group of pensioners from Omaha, identifiable by their baseball caps and big round button badges with their names written in huge letters – designed for identification purposes not just in both face-to-face situations but possibly also when looking in the mirror – are keen to take up the offer. I reckon at least a couple of them are aware it might be the only memory that had any chance of being durable. A tall stooped woman called ‘Arleen’ with glasses so thick she was probably hoping to spot the Eiffel Tower from the top, appears genuinely worried that her ‘companion Tom’ might not even make it up there. Tom, to be fair, look
s as if he was long past caring. I know how he feels. A fussy type called ‘Jan’ oozing a thin veneer of optimism with all the charm of water leeching from supermarket bacon keeps insisting it’ll ‘be really worthwhile when we get there’.

  It isn’t, of course. Things that make you wait in sweaty queues for anything more than half an hour rarely are. The view is remarkable enough – on one side the clear blue waters of a lake that even from up here seems to have no opposite shore, and on the other, straight lines of freeways running uninterrupted across vast flat plains for what looks to be half the way to Tokyo. But that’s it really. And you can’t see the beach volleyball players at all. The trouble is that skyline panoramas seldom look quite as good as the postcards or the wide-angle photographs you’ve been staring at in the queue for the last 40 minutes to the extent you no longer need to consult the tableau of landmarks because you’ve already memorised the ones you care about. In real life it never looks that good anyhow, not least because the windows are dirty.

  Now I can see why if it’s your job to clean the windows on the Sears Tower you might be tempted to throw a sickie now and then, especially when the rota says today’s the day for the 103rd floor. Frankly I would rather eat ground glass with chilli fries than hang outside a tapering building some 1,440 feet above the ground. But if somebody’s got to do it, then surely somebody’s got to do it, particularly if you’re charging the punters a healthy chunk of cash to get up there; believe me they’re not doing it for the fun of the lift ride, no matter how fast it goes. It could be, of course, that these days such jobs are done by some sort of robot, but if so, he had been throwing a sickie lately too.

  The other reason it never looks as good as the postcards, of course, is that the weather is never as good. This may be true of most postcards but it’s doubly true of skyscrapers. At that height, in fact, weather conditions are always notoriously unpredictable: if there are clouds on the horizon one minute then like as not you’re going be in them the next. It’s not called the Windy City for nothing. And that sign right next to the ticket office on the ground floor saying NO REFUNDS FOR POOR VISIBILITY is a bit of a dead giveaway, isn’t it?

  As it happens, we’re as lucky as most people get and the view is clear as far as the distant curved lines of the horizon in all directions, except of course that the sky is not as blissfully blue as it might be, and anyway even if it had been, every time I try to get my picture taken against it, a pensioner from Omaha with a baseball cap and button badge wanders into the frame. Still at least the button badges serve a purpose; back home you can say, ‘Oh yes, and there’s Arleen. From Omaha.’

  Back down to earth – almost – it’s time for a rattling ride on Chicago’s famous ‘El’, which to most natives is more of a symbol of the city than even the world’s highest building. The Elevated Railway began back in the 1890s as a series of trains coming into the centre of Chicago from the growing suburbs. It was only when the notorious Charles Tyson Yerkes, a Pennsylvania financier, became involved and bribed, blackmailed and bullied his way into getting them all linked up in the middle around the central business district known then and forever after as The Loop that the institution became what it is today.

  And what it is, is an ancient rickety, rattling, incredibly noisy urban railway raised to first-floor level making like hell for anyone whose windows open onto it, causing intolerable congestion on the roads below, hemmed in by its supports. Not hard, therefore, to see why almost anyone with any sense in the city centre opposed Yerkes in the first place. In a city that was not to be known for its principled uninfluenced public office, Yerkes got his way, the ‘El’ got built and nobody in Chicago today can imagine the city without it.

  The only thing to be thankful for – from a British point of view – is that when he finally got squeezed out of Chicago by a reforming mayor, and devoted his attentions to London instead, taking control of half the Tube lines between 1900 and 1905, he at least had the decency to keep them underground. What saves Chicago, though, from being dominated at ground level by the rattling ‘El’ is the river, another aspect of the city I hadn’t quite imagined. The Chicago winds gently through the city named after it, providing a mode of transport – primarily for sightseers – but more importantly, a riverbank for cafés and restaurants to spread out along, oases of relaxation in a bustling but surprisingly relaxed city.

  But the wife has been to Chicago before and is keen to show me around and I’m off to take in another of the city’s towers, thankfully this time not to queue for an elevator to the top. There again, it’s hard to imagine catching an elevator to the top of a thing that looks like Ely’s eleventh-century cathedral on steroids. The Tribune Tower was always going to be interesting in an oblique sort of way if only because an old journalistic chum once worked for the paper and it has a reputation as an organ of probity. Newspaper buildings these days tend to be dull functional glass and steel office blocks, but I used to work for the Daily Telegraph in the days when it still occupied a baronial building on Fleet Street and had a little lawn outside the sixth-floor boardroom where the proprietor Lord Hartwell could be found watering his tulips.

  But even that ill prepared me for a cross between a mediaeval French Gothic ecclesiastical masterpiece and a kleptomaniac’s castle. Especially in the middle of such an unabashedly twentieth-century city as Chicago. The Tribune Tower has more ornate flying buttresses than Notre Dame de Paris. Quirkily it has most of them where they serve no purpose at all, near the top of its great soaring tower. This American Gothic Gormenghast was actually completed in 1925, its design the result of a competition held by Col Robert McCormick, the Tribune’s publisher, who clearly wanted to find the loopiest architect in America. He not only succeeded; he added a few more plainly potty elements of his own, notably that the tower should include a rock from each of the 50 states of the union.

  A nice idea, a gesture even towards the ambitions of the Tribune, amongst many other regional-based papers none of which have yet wholly succeeded in becoming a genuine national institution. You can even think it laudable that the federal government contributed to this idea by including a stone from the White House during one of its many restorations. And a stone from Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Illinois, though perhaps a bit naughty, is still somehow homage to the nation’s history. The trouble is, that this tokenism caught on to the extent of becoming something of a craze among the Tribune’s far-flung correspondents.

  So we have a piece of the Berlin Wall included too. Why not? If ever a structure deserved demolishing and spreading to the four winds, it was that one. I have a chunk in my desk drawer which I prised from the wall myself, and in any case these days there have probably been enough ‘certified genuine’ bits sold globally to rebuild the damn thing a dozen times over. Equally it is hard not to be moved by the touching expression of solidarity in including a six-inch blackened and twisted mesh of steel wire from the ruined framework of the World Trade Center.

  But that’s not all. The stone from Flodden Field, I grant you, may not be missed, but how about the cannon ball from Pevensey Castle? It is possible that the fire-blackened piece of mediaeval pinnacle from Cologne Cathedral was discarded during the restoration process after the British-American firebombing and therefore has a legitimate place as a ‘scalp’. But does the same go for the carved ‘fleur de lys’ from Notre Dame in Paris, donated perhaps in recognition of the architectural homage? And what’s with this stone from Edinburgh Castle? Or the bit of Westminster Abbey? Surplus to requirements in restoration work? Maybe, but if they’re good enough to include here, why weren’t they good enough to be reused?

  And what about the stone from Dublin Post Office? A token of Irish-American solidarity no doubt in sympathy for that building’s bombardment by the British during the 1916 rebellion? And does that make the chunk of balustrade from the Wawel Castle in Krakow, seat of Poland’s ancient kings, a celebration of Chicago’s huge Polish community? Maybe. And the stone from the Powder Tower i
n Riga? And what about the one from the Tainitzkaya Tower of the Kremlin? And the one from the Danish fortress of Helsingor (Hamlet’s Elsinore)? And the bits from Sydney Opera House, the Great Wall of China and the Taj Mahal? And then the piece of marble from the Roman ruins of Leptis Magna in Libya?

  I suppose it’s just possible that Muammar Gaddafi is such a keen Tribune reader that he ordered a minion to hack off a lump of his country’s most famed ancient monument to an organ of Yankee imperialism. But my recommendation is: next time you find yourself interviewed at home by a correspondent from the Chicago Tribune, frisk him or her on arrival for penknives, picks, jemmies and other easily concealed mason’s tools, do a full body search on leaving and check that that garden gnome wandering down the path holding his hand is leaving of his own free will. By the Tribune Tower’s front door there are two niches of the type that in European Catholic churches hold statues of saints, and I find it hard to believe there isn’t a wager running in the newsroom as to who can fill them first.

  I’m just tempted to take my Swiss Army knife to see if I can remove one of the Tribune Tower’s trademark lanterns – hey, what’s wrong with a bit of reciprocity and it would look great in my study – when the wife grabs me by the arm and hauls me off. No souvenir-hunting for me, I’m off to see the cousin-in-law’s kitchen.

  You’ll be as disappointed as I was to find that the kitchen is a bit of a letdown. Cousin Helen has driven in to pick us up from a bar that I’ve just located – and made a mental note to return to later – and take us home for dinner. Home is what most Americans imagine homes to be, which is basically what it looks like on all those TV shows from the Simpsons to just about any suburban sitcom you can imagine: a nice house, with a nice double garage, on a chunk of manicured green grass lawn – which they perversely call a ‘yard’ – in a nice part of town.

  The nice part of town in this case is Forest Park which is very nice indeed, to the extent that it calls itself a village, which is what nice parts of suburban London do too, if they can get away with it. And Helen is a nice woman with a nice husband – who produces some very nice and very welcome cold beer on our arrival – and a couple of nice kids. In fact she is that phenomenon, largely unknown to us: the ‘soccer mom’, which means a housewife who takes her daughters to play football. In Britain, of course – Bend it Like Beckham notwithstanding – this would be exceptional but over here it is normal. ‘Soccer’ is a girls’ game. Never mind, they’ll catch on one day. But don’t hold your breath.