The other afternoon, Jerry Ferncl ventured up from the catacomb of streets that wind through underground Chicago and blinked at the sunlight and swank shops of Michigan Avenue.
Ferncl-craggy and soot-encrusted, his face framed by a wreath of matted hair-has been homeless longer than he cares to say. For five of those years, he has lived in the shadowy, subterranean labyrinth below Wacker Drive and Michigan Avenue.
”Some been down for 20,” he said.
Ferncl and the others make up a loosely knit, hardscrabble society. At least two dozen homeless men and women nest in cardboard boxes and tattered blankets, some tucked behind pillars or huddled against chain link fences on the streets that stretch from the lake to the river, from Grand Avenue to the Eisenhower Expressway.
They survive by meshing with the rhythms of the working world, learning when the loading docks rumble to life and when the dumpsters fill and are ripe for new picking.
They know each others` sleeping places and habits. They keep in touch and pass along bulletins of violent crime.
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”The people who end up down here are among the toughest cases in the city,” said social worker Paul Tanner.
Unlike the homeless who wander the streets above ground and crowd into shelters at night, these underground street people are invisible men and women, scavenging like rats in the shadows.
One man says he lives in competition with the rodents. Before he retires for the night in his cardboard box, he carefully places bits of food several yards away, hoping to lure rats away from his shelter. ”You have to play a little bit of a head game with rats,” explained the man, who would not give his name, ”otherwise they`ll come in here and try to take what little bit of food I have, and then there`ll really be an argument.”
On a deserted strip of land below Stetson Avenue, a 36-year-old man lives alone in an elaborate, sprawling duplex built from packing crates, plastic bags and baling wire.
”Everything outside of here is public property,” he said. ”Inside is my home.”
Nearby, a group of Cuban refugees, who came to America as part of the Mariel boatlift more than a decade ago, move from spot to spot, setting up quick, lean-to shanties.
A woman who refuses to show her face to outreach workers lies hidden beneath a pile of plastic dropcloths at the side of a Lake Shore Drive entrance ramp. When asked if she needed assistance, she answered, ”Have a nice life.”
A few feet away, a drifter known as ”Big Man” sits with his dogs in an abandoned car. Attached to the car`s nose is a small Confederate flag.
”The ones who live down here don`t consider themselves homeless,” said Sandra Be, supervisor of Project Linkage, a city-funded outreach program run by Travelers & Immigrants Aid of Chicago. ”They consider this their home, and they don`t want to leave it.”
Most of them live in these serpentine, green-lit corridors because they are unwilling or unable to adapt to what outreach workers call ”the shelter lifestyle.”
Many suffer from mental illnesses like schizophrenia, according to social workers and psychologists who treat them, and they find the social pressures of the city`s congested shelters nearly unbearable.
”I got more safety being down here because I know all the people,” said Ferncl, 56. ”I know where everybody sleeps. I know what`s what.”
The homeless here, like other places, also suffer inordinately from tuberculosis, AIDS and skin diseases such as cellulitis, a bacterial infection that causes skin to swell, medical outreach workers say.
Death can be sudden and violent.
”Gangs will come by and beat up the homeless just for the hell of it,”
said Frank Roberts, 61, a security guard at the Executive House, 71 E. Wacker Drive. ”Sometimes I find them frozen to death in their cardboard boxes.”
In July, a 21-year-old South Side man was sentenced to 60 years in jail for killing a Lower Wacker Drive homeless man with a razor-tipped arrow shot from a crossbow. Authorities called it a ”thrill kill.”
This is not a place where most people linger. The streets are dark and menacing, even in the daytime. Social workers caution visitors against walking here alone.
But some do venture down.
Walter Degrand, 63, a freight elevator operator of the 35 E. Wacker building, said city and suburban commuters often pull their cars over and leave bags of food next to the people asleep in boxes and tattered blankets.
On Thursday, one good samaritan left paper plates stacked with cookies and chocolate candies perched on a dumpster.
Nearly every day,pizza delivery man Jerry Ratliff, 49, or one of his co-workers distributes unsold pizzas to the street dwellers.
”Last night we handed out 10 pies,” Ratliff said Thursday. ”I try to give each man half a pizza or at least a lunch pack.”
The gifts aren`t always accepted.
On Thursday, outreach worker Be approached a man named John who was leaning against a stone pillar at the base of the Civic Opera House, smoking a cigar stub. As usual, John rebuffed Be`s efforts at conversation and aid.
”I appreciate what you`re doing because there are a lot of homeless people who could use your help. But I have everything I need right here,”
John said, indicating his cigar.
When Be left, he told a visitor: ”It`s not right for me to get all this attention. I don`t even have a job, and I`m getting attention like I was a Rockefeller.”
The minuet between the social worker and an unwilling client becomes deadly earnest on subzero days, or when illness sets in. In these cases, the city`s Mobile Assessment Unit is dispatched.
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The 2-year-old unit, funded by the state and run by Thresholds, a non-profit agency that provides services to the mentally ill, is staffed by 10 social work staffers who are authorized to forcibly hospitalize homeless people for up to 72 hours.
Social workers said that during cold spells in Chicago, about one homeless person is hospitalized by unit staffers every day.
”Some people you have to pull out of the fire,” said social worker Tanner.
As the Mobile Assessment Unit`s van nosed through lower Wacker the other day, many of the regulars vanished into the shadows.
Sprawled on the freezing cement beneath the Oxford House restaurant at 225 N. Wabash Ave. was a man who calls himself O`Hnri Redey.He said he came to Taste of Chicago last year and ”just stayed.”
Scattered around Redey were several Bibles and scraps of paper scrawled with large letters in child-like writing. A broom with no bristles was propped against the wall behind him.
Tanner knelt beside Redey and talked to him for about 20 minutes. But Redey, who muttered about how he controls and is controlled by workers in the nearby buildings, insisted he needed no help. He even declined a new blanket. ”It`s not the weather that bothers me,” Redey said. ”I have a people problem.”
Roberts, the security guard, watches the street from his post at the loading dock. For him, and others, the descent from Upper to Lower Wacker can be frightening and quick.
”I had a situation once myself,” he began. ”First a family problem, then no job. I got depressed and started drinking, and I just hit the street. Just gave up. Two years of sleeping in abandoned buildings and parked cars, waking up hungry and dirty.”
Roberts said he pulled himself together one Sunday morning after waking up drunk in an alley behind a church. ”Something in me just said, `Enough.` I wasn`t born to be lying in the street with a bottle in my mouth.” He walked to a laundromat where he washed his clothes, and he shaved with a razor he found on the floor-the first step in the long climb up for air.
”You and me are this close to being on the street,” said Roberts, his thumbs hitched in his belt loops. ”Half of these people here used to be construction workers, electricians, tradesmen. Now they`re laying out here on the ground. And all over the city, buildings are falling down empty and abandoned.
”I just can`t understand how we could let so much go to waste.”