Anarchy roar
In 2008, on the fourth of July at sundown, I posted up with a few friends on the seawall facing Lake Michigan, and watched some fireworks. The city would invest lavishly, float a huge barge out there, and set off so many fireworks that they filled your entire vision.
This was our annual tradition for a few years, ever since I had moved back to the city in 2006. It was a great way to spend the holiday with friends. We’d pitch a blanket, make a little picnic, open a couple beers, and vibe.
In 2009, claiming the financial crisis, and under the rule of a new austerity-mad neoliberal mayor, the city defunded our annual fireworks display. We cannot have nice things, they said. And that is when the real fireworks began.
Chicago borders Indiana. Our metro area includes part of Wisconsin. In both states, fireworks are legal. In Illinois, fireworks are not. So in practice, everyone just drives to Indiana, goes someplace with a name like “Krazy Kaplans,” fills their entire trunk with fireworks, and takes a roundabout, side-street path back across the state line, so they aren’t stopped by any police. We all did this quietly, without consulting others, without posting.
I want to be clear that nobody buys bottle rockets or roman candles in this situation. Everyone buys industrial mortars, professional-grade stuff, and we all just started setting shit off in our alleys, all over the city. It turned out that our amazing annual fireworks display on the lake served an unintended purpose, which was to prevent the whole city from taking matters into our own hands. July 04, 2009 was the most anarchic, explosive-filled day in my home since the Great Chicago Fire.
That night, I biked from one house party to another around 8:30p. The first was in Avondale, near Kimball/Belmont; the other was in River West, near Grand/Green. Those familiar with Chicago geography know these are about a 40-minute bike ride apart – and there was no Bloomingdale Trail back then, so you couldn’t shortcut through Wicker Park or Bucktown. Instead, you would take Kimball/Homan to Grand straight over. Kimball & Homan go through residential neighborhoods; Grand is mostly industrial warehouse space, flanking the Metra rail yards and (in 2009) a bunch of meatpacking sheds.
What started as a fairly textbook bike ride turned into an attempt to avoid friendly fire from every single alley in west Humboldt. I would bike past an alley and watch the silhouettes of 8 children hunched around a mortar, screaming in delight & mild panic, as I noticed a fuse get lit. An equivalent scene would happen six more times before I turned onto Grand.
As I settled into a quiet ride down Grand – it’s a wide thoroughfare, easily bikeable, and usually low traffic – I could hear a dull roar emerging from Humboldt Park & Ukrainian Village to the north, a continuous din of explosives, and the soft smell of saltpeter. A haze settled over the whole city from the smoke. Chicago is not known for fog, but when it happens it’s so beautiful & ethereal. We took matters into our own hands, I kept thinking.
I thank whatever force created this universe that the party I went to in River West was on a fourth-floor rooftop. You could see clear to Pilsen, east to the lakefront, and it was just a continuous swath of industrial-grade explosives straight to the horizon in every direction. I had never seen anything like it in my life.
The city tried to bring the annual display back, and I guess we had an official display on the 2nd this year, but the damage has been done. Chicagoans have done this every year since – and due to recent events, our democratized explosive ritual has only become more over-the-top. (A recent example is here; forgive the canned background music.)
This is, of course, dangerous as hell. I am certain that more people are getting injured every year, because nobody is qualified to set off industrial mortars. The display looks amazing, but it’s also annoying, because there is no official end time, and so people tend to set off fireworks until the sun comes up. If you like sheer anarchy, as a 27-year-old in 2009 is wont to do, the fireworks are great. Once you’re 40 and settled down, it gets a bit old.
Precautions are taken now. I water my whole backyard before sundown every year. I comfort my dog, who every year jumps at the first few bangs and then just softly dissolves into a dissociated pile of postverbal shock as the dull roar takes over until 4am. I throw an earplug in before I fall asleep. And I would still never miss any of it for the world.