Scott Free in Chinatown

T he young man stood with one foot propped behind him for balance as he raised his face to the sun. Every afternoon for the past month he could be found leaning against the large salmon-colored two-story building that housed the Three Happiness Restaurant on the busiest corner in Chicago’s Chinatown, twenty-two blocks south of downtown.

Now that Scott had graduated from high school, this twenty-something near north-side guy preferred to spend his time on the south side, an area that was removed from anything related to his old life which included a neighborhood awash in thriving poverty in both the buildings and the people. A place where the Blue Line L train regularly rumbled past their second floor flat, missing their structure by a few yards and exposing their kitchen and living room to the daily commuters as it traveled on it’s twenty four hour loop in and out of the city.

Once, out of sheer boredom, he and his next oldest sister staged what looked like a hanging to shock the rush hour trains. They attached a rope to the ceiling beam above the kitchen table, and then they put it around Scott’s neck. He stood on a low stool behind the table, and it honestly looked like he was dangling and dead. His sister’s part was to stand with her hand over her mouth staring at him in horror. Eventually, she got bored with her silent role and added the flailing her arms and looking like she was screaming. By train number five or six she carried her acting career to the heights by silently screaming and then fainting.

It took the cops only twenty minutes to locate them, pound up their stairs and threaten them with all sorts of charges if they ever pulled such a dumb stunt again. Luckily neither of their parents was home at the time, and the cops never carried through with their threat to call them.

Occasionally their father would stand in his undershirt and shorts, unshaven for days and be holding a bottle of beer while yelling at the endlessly passing faces, “Ya wanna see Chicago at its finest folks, just cast your eyes over here to our palatial abode. Go ahead and look, take it all in, then go home and be grateful for the place you’ve got.”

His father was one of those hardened drinkers who worked nights in a metal factory and held fast to his unfailing attitude of poor me. He said he drank to forget, but Scott often wondered, forget what? If anyone had the right to such an attitude, it was Scott’s gentle mother, Ellen. From what his Aunt Della said, her sister had once been a vivacious young woman who had been happily working for a local printing firm when she met her future husband when he came in to place an order for brochures for his car rental company. Unfortunately, he swept her off her feet with his dynamic personality and charm, so she married him a brief six months later against her family’s wishes. She then spent a lifetime regretting her hasty decision.

“Hey, need help with that?” Scott asked taking his foot off of the wall ready to help a middle-aged white guy who was struggling with a large piece of signboard.

“Naw, I’ve got it,” he all but growled.

This cranky older man had been passing by Scott several days in a row, always struggling with strange objects that looked like bits and pieces of construction materials. Chinatown was located right next to an industrialized section full of factories and slow freight trains that inched their way in and out of town on tracks high above the street. Because of the city noise ordinance, the trains were only allowed to sound their horns softly as they passed over the traffic below. Scott always thought the horns sounded like the distant fog horns he had heard when his mom and two sisters were treated to a trip to the east coast when he was very young, thanks to the generosity of his Aunt Della who had a summer home near the ocean.

This south-side manufacturing section housed the second South Water Street Market, a unique group of individual food warehouses that sat cheek to jowl and crammed into several city blocks. Even though he had never seen the market personally, he had done an extra credit report on its history for school and knew they were originally started back in the 1800’s on the north side of the city but moved south as Chicago’s downtown began to grow. It fascinated him that each market stall specialized in only one or two wholesale items like melons, apples, butter, nuts, eggs, peaches, poultry or vegetables. These foodstuffs came from the adjoining states, shipped in by train or arriving by boat and distributed through a series of the 200 individual long and narrow warehouses to businesses, restaurants, and hospitals throughout the metropolis.

He was tired of standing against the building so he joined a crowd crossing the busy street and headed for the dim sum restaurant before it got busy. As he passed endless stores, he thought about the once famous Water Market shops again.

He would never forget the sad fact that still fascinated him when he thought of it, that the wild success of the first market was also the cause of its demise. Evidently, the number of horses and wagons lining the street while loading their wares created an almost impassable barrier along the entire riverfront and burgeoning downtown area. Once the motorized trucks joined the fray, they only exacerbated the problem, making it impossible for pedestrians to walk on the crowded downtown sidewalks. Somewhere in the dim recesses of his mind he also remembered that in its heyday, the market was responsible for over 200 million dollars in commerce annually. That was a lot of money, even by today’s standards, he thought. Wentworth Avenue was crowded enough for him this morning; he couldn’t imagine what it must have been like being even more crowded adding horses and squeezing in even more shops.