Balbo
by Robert Bird
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At the time he lived on the
fifty-eighth storey of a downtown skyscraper. He once
explained that he had originally wanted to settle north of Chicago in the
neighbouring state of Wisconsin, just to have the pleasure of crossing a
border every day on the way to work. In the end he satisfied his thirst for
liminality by renting an apartment on the border between earth and sky. Since
I suffer from chronic vertigo, for me the swaying would have been unbearable,
the view from the balcony (west, “away from the lake,” over the endless
Chicago city grid) – unattainable. To get to his house from our
university enclave on the city’s South Side you had to take the bus up Lake
Shore Drive and exit on Balbo. B-a-l-b-o, he repeated for good measure. He
didn’t explain the origin of the word; perhaps he didn’t realize it himself,
or else assumed (correctly) that I wouldn’t recognize the name. It was only somewhat later that I
would come to understand why this stunted downtown street, leading laterally
from Lake Shore Drive across Grant Park and Michigan Avenue before expiring
at Wabash, bore this curious name. By then my friend had married and moved
south to Printers’ Row, to the top storey of a lower building over the tracks
of the noisy elevated train. To me, the place seemed just as uncomfortable as
his other perch, and they have since separated. It was his wife who sold me the
bicycle. I can’t recall all the details; something about an ex-boyfriend who
had moved abroad. At any rate, the bike proved too small for me and I soon
regretted the purchase. I’ve a new one now, but it was that bike which
brought me to Balbo. For
the bike-owning resident of Chicago, whether the bike is too big, too small,
or just right, there is only one option: to head for Lake Shore Drive.
Chicago was conceived as a no-frills city. Everyone knows about the
stockyards; they are largely gone, I think, but they left behind a legacy of
exceedingly unwelcoming city planning. The streets run like an infinite game
of noughts and crosses. You identify your location by the corner you inhabit,
as if the city grid is entirely bereft of solid spaces. Some streets are
permanently hidden from the sun by elevated train tracks, and the residents
of buildings alongside them must be in a constant state of nerves due to
their rickety racket. And the highways, which pierce the city like a
magician’s swords, form straightaways fit for Formula One racing and
junctions which clog like a… You get the idea. In short, bicycling
opportunities are few and far between, and for all intents and purposes are
limited to a seventeen-mile stretch of public lake-front, built on land
reclaimed from Lake Michigan and vacated by the moribund railway yards. It
was typical of old Chicago to waste its lake-front on industrial uses, but it
has worked out all right in the end. Chicago is justly proud of its
architecture, but for me it has not been love at first sight. Many of the
great buildings seem uninhabitable, such as a Mies van der Rohe highrise near
our house or the I. M. Pei shoeboxes which litter Hyde Park. Many of the
mayor’s recent pet projects have the air of the white elephant about them.
But the city grows on one. Some of the successes are inadvertent. There is
great footage of the first Mayor Daley’s astonishment after Picasso’s horsey
sculpture was unveiled downtown in 1973. If he had known what he was getting
into, he would have had himself bronzed and placed on a pedestal. On my way
to Balbo I pass by a new memorial to lost firefighters: a strip of lawn along
the lake is dotted with large limestone boulders. Next to one boulder stands
a very lifelike pair of bronze fireman’s boots, a helmet resting on the rock.
The first time I saw them I thought one of the lakeside landscapers had
decided to take a morning dip in the lake, but as the boots and helmet
remained, day after day, their eerie momento
mori began to set in. The recent opening of Millennium Park was a real
eye-opener. It features a bandstand by Frank Gehry and several curious
sculptures which have proven very popular with locals and tourists alike.
Still, Chicago loves to throw up obstacles to prevent people from
appreciating it in full. Recently a boat full of tourists on an architectural
tour was passing under a bridge, everyone gazing up at the skyline, when a
bus on the bridge emptied its toilets onto them. Faced
with such an array of puzzling sights it took me a while to get going on the
bike. At first I rode gingerly, expecting the same pits and cracks in the
bike path as we have in our road. Like most things in Chicago, the path is
tediously straight and flat. The only real difficulty is the wind; sometimes
I sail down to Balbo only to find that, when I turn around, I have to fight
for every inch. Despite frequent protestations of innocence, Chicago is a
very windy city. But the lake-front is different from most other things in
Chicago in that it works more or less according to design. I begin at Promontory
Point, a rugged peninsula bounded by limestone boulders which has enough
charm to have Chicago’s city planners fighting tooth and nail to replace it
with another concrete monstrosity. On the way north I pass playgrounds,
basketball courts, and a skateboarding rink, all placed attractively
alongside beaches and dotted with parked cars with people sat suspiciously
bolt upright in the front seats, staring out into the lake in deep thought or
in a stupor of intoxication. Then I pass the convention centre McCormick
Place, a blight-inducing hulk of steel and glass and concrete, closed to the
outside world, standing like a forgotten spaceship at an abandoned launchpad.
I’ll never go inside; such buildings in America invariably attack their
inhabitants with an unbearable high-pitched hum of ventilation systems. But I
am always curious to ride by and peek inside at the convention of dentists or
hackers, on my way to Balbo. The
area around Balbo is called the museum campus. It had to be called something,
I suppose, and it is the last obstacle to pass. Soldier Field appears to the
left up ahead. That’s another Chicago disaster I’ll refrain from remarking
on. In short, they took a perfectly good depression-era stadium and stuck an
abominable ring of glass-and-concrete stands inside, which sticks out like an
former-bodybuilder in his wedding suit. As the path curls here, just past
Sledder’s Hill (for the rare occasions when there is sufficient snow for it
to turn from a nuisance into a blessing), almost lost amidst the lampposts
and the inescapable flagpoles, stands Balbo. Of
course it’s not Balbo himself, although there are plenty of statues in the
environs. If you continue for another hundred yards and hang a right, you end
up on the road to Northerly Island, which features equestrian statues of
Kosciuszko and Havliček. Kosciuszko we know; a statue of him stands
opposite the White House in Washington D.C., in a park where all the homeless
people sleep. The inscription calls him (in Polish) a “warrior of two worlds.”
Havliček was a mystery to me until I finally got around to reading the
inscription. I should have known, but then that’s what monuments are for, I
suppose, to make sure we don’t forget. Until
recently, Northerly Island housed an airport for private planes. The mayor
coveted the land for use as a park, so one night he sent in the bulldozers
without telling anyone. The next morning executives flying in from around the
region found themselves unable to land, and those who had arrived a day
before had to have their planes towed home on the clogged highways. Typical,
really. Still, Northerly Island is now a superb place to ride; sown with wild
flowers and surrounded by the oceanic lake, it makes you forget for a moment
all about Chicago. Instead of stopping my forward progression at Balbo and
heading back for home (making a circuit of about twelve miles), I have now
added a tour of the island and have come to accept the mayor’s airport
policy. It
is probably good that Balbo himself is not there. Italo Balbo was an
important member of the Fascist Party in Italy who flew to Chicago in 1934 on
the occasion of the World’s Fair. He led a flotilla of sea-planes which
landed on Lake Michigan, bringing with them a curious gift for his hosts in
the name of civilization: an elegant Roman column from Ostia. Here’s the full
inscription: QUESTA COLONNA DI VENTI SECOLI
ANTICA ERETTA SUL LIDO DI
OSTIA PORTO DI ROMA
IMPERIALE A VIGILARE LE
FORTUNE E LE VITTORIE DELL TIREMI ROMANE L’ITALIA FASCISTA SUSPICE BENITO
MUSSOLINI DONA A CHICAGO ESALTAZIONE SIMBOLO RICORDO DELLA SQUADRA ATLANTICA GUIDATA DA
BALBO CHE CON ROMANO
ARDIMENTO TRASVOLO L’OCEANO NELL’ANNO XI DEL LITTORIO The
English text is on the West side of the rectangular base, facing away from
the bike path and from the marina which nestles between the lake shore and
Northerly Island. It’s probably a good thing, too, because despite its
suspect syntax it reads as clear as day: THIS COLUMN TWENTY CENTURIES OLD ERECTED ON THE SHORES OF OSTIA PORT OF IMPERIAL ROME TO SAFEGUARD THE FORTUNES AND VICTORIES OF THE ROMAN TRIREMES FASCIST ITALY BY COMMAND OF BENITO MUSSOLINI PRESENTS TO CHICAGO EXALTATION SYMBOL MEMORIAL OF THE ATLANTIC SQUADRON LED BY BALBO THAT WITH ROMAN DARING FLEW ACROSS THE OCEAN IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR OF THE FASCIST ERA So there, in
the midst of Chicago, stands a forgotten, unseen, yet intriguing monument to
Italian fascism, perhaps the only one of its kind in the world. My understanding of Italian
fascism is largely derived from Fellini’s Amarcord
and the memories of my grandfather, who fought with Italians in World War I
and could never forgive their changing sides the next time around. And yet it
is this monument which has made me feel most at home in Chicago. Let me
explain. Ever since I first travelled to Italy
at the age of seven the country has been my major conduit for history and
culture. Growing up in an age of pre-fab concrete and glass, there has always
been something of a homecoming in these trips. They have been limited; our
attempt to visit Pompei was thwarted by striking museum workers. Pompei on
strike! But I have since recouped this loss at Ostia, where you can roam
unmolested for as long as you can stand the heat, climbing millennia-old
stairs to the upper floors of homes which today stand stronger than much of
the historic South Side of Chicago, where time has wrought more savage
revenge. A major focus of my academic
research has been Viacheslav Ivanov, a Russian poet who resided in Italy for
long periods in the 1890s and for the last twenty-five years of his life,
from 1924 to 1949. His son Dimitri was my gracious host at the Ivanov family
archive, which remains in Rome under the care of Andrei Shishkin from the
University of Salerno, who lives in Ostia. The US academic schedule limits my
research trips to the summer months, and there is nothing better to do after
a day spent in the dusty archives than to head for the beaches at Ostia, swim
(to the consternation of the land-hugging locals), and sup at a beachside
restaurant or at the table of hospitable hosts. Once we even took a short
bicycle trip through the woods at Ostia, stumbling over the ruined mansions
which dot even the most inauspicious piece of landscape. Over the years Ostia
has become for me a window on all of Italy, a staging ground for various
forays around the country. Last time we went to Pavia, a wonderful little
town where Ivanov taught for fifteen years (at the Collegio Borromeo), and
where bicycles heavily outnumber motorized vehicles. To discover a piece of Ostia in
the heart of Chicago, however distasteful the donor and the occasion, has
been to regain a sense of permanence in the city, and therefore to regain a
sense of memory. Chicago is no longer merely a grid of temporary dwellings
and businesses. It has become a place where even poets may once have resided.
I recall now that, when I told Dimitri Viacheslavovich of my impending
relocation, he mentioned he had a good friend here. Perhaps it’s time to look
him up. |
