I’ve had a ringside seat to not just one but two major cities going through the process of gentrification over the last 25+ years. I say “process” because there’s always that joke that if you suddenly see people wearing Joy Division shirts and carrying yoga mats in your neighborhood that the rent is about to go up, and that’s not wrong. But I think I’m in a rare position to say that I’ve literally been pretty much every stage of the process in Chicago and New York (Brooklyn) since the late-1990s since those are the two places I’ve spent the most amount of time in my life. Brooklyn, it’s been a little easier to keep track of since that’s where I’ve lived for the last 20 years. I was the late-1990s and early-aughts version of the Joy Division shirt and yoga mat person, then I was the priced-out and now I’m…something. A stable citizen? Somebody who knows how to operate in the city? I don’t know. I’m able to complain when a change I don’t like takes place because I’m settled in. That’s all I know now.
Still, even before I became a legal resident of the State of New York, I was hanging around the Lower East Side and walking the bridge into Williamsburg, and starting to see the early days of a place changing. Being around there as long as I have means that each new old building going down or some new glass monstrosity going up is just part of the daily grind of things. I left Chicago in 2002 and around that time, I was definitely part of a change. Young, artistically-inclined, usually white people moving to the neighborhood. The idea was something different from nearby Wicker Park where the young, artistically-inclined, usually white people a few years older than me had gone looking for cheap spaces and eventually ended up attracting the young, professionally-inclined, usually white sort of people the artistically-inclined tried to get away from. When I moved to the city, I didn’t think my presence would be a small pebble in a great, big avalanche that would take years and decades to roll all the way downhill, but all these years after I first moved into an apartment in Logan Square and decorated it with Christmas lights and band posters tacked to the wall, I can absolutely see the process at its logical (almost?) conclusion. And it’s sort of weird. I compare it to the scene towards the end of Interview With the Vampire where Brad Pitt’s Louis is back in New Orleans after a few hundred years away, and he’s obviously equally fascinated with how his hometown has changed, but he’s also sad about it. It’s the same place, but it’s also not.
What’s not the same when I go to Chicago is the corporations moved in. The Target in Logan Square, for instance, weirds me out. I miss the market that was there. The big glass buildings on Milwaukee, I don’t totally get the point of those. The family-friendly vibe doesn’t bother me considering I’ve been living in or around Park Slope for 15 years. It’s just not what I’m used to in Logan Square, I suppose.
But there is always the familiar. And the thing that knocked me out of my melancholy was seeing Claudio Velez, the Tamale Guy, show up to the bar I was at with his little red cooler. That’s Chicago to me. The food, obviously. But the man and his story, how he operates, where he comes from and everything he’s had to go through, Velez serves up the food I tell everybody to eat when they’re in town. I say to eat Mexican food, obviously. I tell them tavern style over deep dish and I won’t talk them away from trying an Italian beef or a hot dog, but you need to find the Tamale Guy’s tamales, and you need to eat them in a bar around 11 when you’ve had a few drinks and you’re thinking about how you could absolutely crush any food put in front of you at that given second. The man, I’m convinced, is magic. He just shows up and whether you were thinking of tamales or not, suddenly you realize exactly what you need for everything to be better.
I was telling somebody who was actually lamenting how things don’t change as much in Chicago as they do in New York that I think that’s a great thing. They told me they wish there was more change, just to keep things interesting. To me, that’s the slippery slope towards a certain sense of instability. I never feel like anything is forever in New York, and that does bum me out. Also, I think Chicago’s weird (maybe a little racist) public transportation system does make it difficult for people to really explore the place. I know plenty of people that haven’t gone beyond the North Side much, the other parts of the city and all their splendors remain unknown to them. It’s a shame when I hear that because it’s such a big city with so much to offer, but I realize it’s often also in the plans to keep people spread out and outside looking in.
But at the end of the day, New York doesn’t have Tamale Guy. It has plenty of people and places you can get tamales from. You can find basically anything you want to eat at all hours of the day in NYC and that’s lovely. But besides maybe Ray Alverez at Ray’s Candy Store on Ave. A, I can’t think of too many people in Manhattan or Brooklyn that I’ve been seeing doing the same thing for the last few decades. That doesn’t mean there aren’t those people, but I do think it’s indicative of the fact that New York is a difficult city to settle in for a long period of time. I wish that wasn’t the case, and my hope is that Chicago doesn’t ever get that way. I hope Velez—who has had plenty of stops and starts as he’s worked to scratch out some piece of the American dream—can do what he does as long as he wants or needs to. I hope the places I knew 20+ years ago that are still around will continue to offer a place for more generations of wayward 20-somethings or the weekday hungover types looking for a spicy Bloody Mary with a back of beer. I hope new things come and add to the city, but I hope the old, classics and the people that give these places and neighborhoods character don’t get erased further in order for that to happen. I’ve watched all this take place over my adult life, and I’ve accepted things I can’t change, but I also know there’s plenty in the cities I love that keeps me living in and, in the case of Chicago, always coming back to.
My first tamales were at Happy Village. My last outside Zakopane 10 years later. This made me miss them more than ever.
Beautiful, Jason.