Every morning-rain or shine or, more appropriately for January, snow or wicked wind-the No. 6 Jackson Park Express bus drops me at the southeast corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive before it turns around to makes its way back south.
I, of course, am headed north, because the Tribune Tower sits, rather majestically I might add, just across the river.
The Michigan Avenue Bridge, built between 1917 and 1920 and 220 feet in length, is my means of transport, and every day, no matter the weather, I pause in the middle of that bridge. This is where Chicago comes together for me, in a symphony of buildings and water and sky.
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Just a few days before Christmas, a mother and son, he perhaps 12, were on the bridge staring west and she was saying, “That is where Donald Trump is building his new building,” though the kid could have determined that from the ample signage.
The boy nodded his head and pointed his finger at the structure and shouted, “You’re fired. You’re fired.”
Yes, you can see the future from the bridge, but it is also where the past whispers, telling of the Algonquins who found skunk cabbage and wild onion on the banks of the river and affixed to this site the Indian name for those earth products, Checagou; of Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, the black man who became the first non-native settler here when he built a cabin on the river’s northern bank in the 1770s; of the Ft. Dearborn massacre of 1812, and of the engineering geniuses who reversed the river’s flow in 1900 to keep the lake clean.
Sometimes I will walk down the stairs and cross the bridge on its lower level, where Osgood took the lovely photo on this page and which always evokes the encounter between Eliot Ness (Kevin Kostner) and cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery) in the 1987 film “The Untouchables,” its screenplay by Chicago’s own David Mamet.
In the winter the river is often jammed with ice and in the summer with boats. The view changes every day and that too is part of the attraction. Maybe you have a special place, a spot in the city that gives you peace and perspective. If not, feel free to share my bridge, my favorite place in my favorite city in the world.
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