Never a City So Real

by Alex Kotlowitz

  Celikoski (pronounced Chelikoski) was twenty years old in 1982 when he left Albania for the United States. His father, who had had a sheep farm in Albania and had fled after his own father, an anti-Communist, had mysteriously disappeared, had preceded Ramazan by twelve years and was working as a cook in a downtown restaurant when Celikoski arrived. For a year, the two shared a room in a hotel, and then Ramazan found an apartment in Albany Park. Like his father, he worked in a series of eating establishments, as a busboy at a fancy downtown restaurant and as a cook at the popular coffee shop Lou Mitchell’s. It was at his first job that coworkers began calling him John, which is what he goes by today. In the summer of 2003, he purchased GT’s (truthfully, all he had to do was pick up the two-thousand-dollar-a-month lease) from a hot-tempered man, who also happened to be Albanian; while the previous owner had been losing money, Celikoski thought with his more easygoing nature he could turn it around. Though he did break even in his fourth month, he has yet to make a profit, in part because here, in this out-of-the-way strip mall, Celikoski has, grousing along the way, unintentionally transformed GT’s into the equivalent of a domestic nongovernmental organization—an NGO.

  Celikoski, who’s forty-two and of medium build, has deep-set eyes, dark, thick eyebrows, and a hawklike nose, all of which might conspire to give him a look of intensity were it not for his ever-present crooked grin, which seems to say, “What are you going to do?” The first time we met, it was midafternoon, and the diner was empty except for two Mexican-American men in a nearby booth. “They’re no good,” he muttered, nodding toward the two patrons. “Some of them drink too much. Some of them are here from six in the morning until twelve and not even buy coffee. At lunchtime, I tell them they got to go.” As he complained about the day laborers, he was, as always, smiling.

  Shortly after Celikoski purchased GT’s, a group of two hundred or so day laborers were evicted from the spot where they had been congregating each morning at a nearby bus turnaround. There they had constructed a makeshift plywood hut to give them shelter from the rain. They soon found their way over to GT’s, where, because of the mall’s parking lot, there was room for employers to drive in and pick up workers for the day. Moreover, the day laborers needed a place to take shelter from the elements as well as a bathroom. GT’s offered both. On any given morning in the winter, fifty to sixty men, most of them Hispanic—though a few Mongolians and Cambodians as well—gather in the parking lot, just outside GT’s, waiting for potential employers to drive up, usually in their SUVs, which the laborers swarm to like moths to a lightbulb. Since it’s January, work is hard to come by, which is why these two men were still lingering at the diner at midday. One of them who looked to be in his twenties approached Celikoski and asked for a cigarette. Celikoski gave him one of his Marlboros. “Wake up your friend, please,” Celikoski told the young man, who was wearing a GAP baseball cap. The other man, who looked to be in his forties, his hair disheveled, his down jacket ripped, had rested his head on the table. “I wake him up three times,” the younger man said. Celikoski calmly walked over to the dozing laborer and gently shook him. “Amigo, wake up. Please, you go home and sleep. Respect me.” The man lifted his head, revealing a fresh wound on his forehead. He looked disoriented, as if he’d been drinking. Celikoski walked away, shaking his head. A few days earlier, he told me, feeling sorry for this man, Celikoski had given him a container of chicken noodle soup which he took out on the sidewalk to eat. The man consumed half of it before passing out, falling headfirst into the soup.

  Celikoski grumbles incessantly about the day laborers. He says that on occasion they’ll leave without paying for their coffee. Do you go after them? I ask. “For seventy-nine cents I say ‘forget about it,’ ” he tells me. He says he’s lost customers, especially women and children, who are intimidated by the loitering men. He says they’ll gamble on the sidewalk outside, that they’ll occasionally get into fights. And he contends they can’t find work because they’re too greedy. “They ask for too much money,” he says. “They ask for one hundred fifty dollars for eight hours. It’s no good.” But the thing about it is if you spend time at GT’s with Celikoski, listening to him try out his newly learned Spanish and offering the recently purchased hot pepper mix, one gets the distinct impression that he rather enjoys their company.

  I arrive one morning, shortly after seven a.m. It’s thirteen degrees out, and so GT’s is packed with the day laborers seeking refuge from the cold. One man, who tells me his name is George and that he arrived from Guatemala fifteen years ago, is sitting at the counter, eating a breakfast of three scrambled eggs, potatoes, toast, and coffee. He’s one of the few who actually buys a meal, this one for $3.39, usually when he’s just finished a job and is flush with cash. He spent the past two days cleaning an abandoned factory for nine dollars an hour; it was his first hire in twelve days. (Many of the day laborers tell me that they do indeed ask for a lot of money but that it’s because they need room to negotiate; otherwise, they say, they run the risk of getting paid near or even below minimum wage.) George is thirty-six and has soft features and an open face. He’s wearing a black skullcap that he’s shaped into the form of a Robin Hood hat. He taught elementary school in Guatemala, and in his first few years in the United States he worked in a poultry plant in South Carolina before it closed. “He’s my friend,” he says, nodding at Celikoski, who’s flipping a pair of frying eggs. “Juan,” he says of Celikoski, “he’s kind of a quiet guy. He’s trying with his Spanish. Sometimes I make my order in Spanish.” He smiles mischievously. “I’ll speak to him in Spanish. See if he understands.”

  “Te gustan los tacos?” George asks.

  “Mucho,” Celikoski replies.

  “Que tipo de tacos?”

  “Pollo y carne.”

  “Bueno,” George tells Celikoski.

  Another customer, Manuel Rodas, also from Guatemala, is at the other end of the counter. He’s listening in on the conversation. He tells me that not long ago, he’d arrived one morning after a few days of steady work, and ordered breakfast. He then realized he’d left his wallet at home. Celikoski told him not to worry. He could pay the next day, which he did. Celikoski interrupts. He thanks Rodas for recently fixing the store’s toilet handle, which had broken from so much usage. “He tried to pay me but I said no,” Rodas tells me. “So he gave me a free meal.”

  A white man in a leather jacket walks into GT’s, seeking workers. He sits down at a booth and is quickly surrounded by ten men. He’s looking for someone with a truck, and so the men call out to George, who owns a small battered pickup. George is gone before I can get his last name.

  I return a week later, on the Martin Luther King holiday. Celikoski had told me that a group of community organizers planned to hold a press conference at the diner to draw attention to the day laborers’ frustration at not having a permanent site. “You agreed to let them hold the press conference at your diner?” I had asked, somewhat incredulous given his previous rant. He shrugged. “It’s a slow day for business anyway,” he said. When I arrive, the place is packed, maybe thirty people, most of them simply milling around. As people order cups of coffee or hot chocolate, it becomes clear that Celikoski has no intention of taking their money. When he sees there are some children at the rally, he asks one parent how many of them there are. The father looks perplexed. He counts on his fingers. “Eight,” he says.

  “I make eight egg sandwiches for them,” Celikoski insists. “On the house.”

  At one point, I comment to Celikoski’s lone employee, a newly arrived young Albanian, that he’s going to give away the restaurant. The young man, as if to mimic his employer, shrugs. “He’s the boss,” he says. Celikoski later tells me that he doesn’t expect to turn a profit until the warm months when the business picks up and the day laborers find construction work and so are gone by early morning.

  The next day, Celikoski is grumbling again. “Let me tell you something,” he says. “If America has a job for everybody,
and these fifty, sixty people don’t, maybe they are lazy, maybe they don’t want to work. When I come to this country I find a job right away.” He then shows me a letter he’d received earlier that day from “concerned residents” (there were no names attached) asking shop owners in the mall to post NO TRESPASSING signs, and to file complaints with the police about the day laborers loitering in the strip mall’s parking lot. “Will you?” I ask Celikoski. He shakes his head. “I feel sorry,” he tells me. “Some of them are good.” He says that as a child in Albania he learned from his parents something called besa-bes, which, he tells me, means if someone comes to your home, you help them. “Winter,” he says, “it’s tough for everybody.”

  Isn’t That the Corniche?

  This is a short and yet emblematic tale about Chicago. At its center is a man who was so in love with his city’s architecture that he decided to find a way to have it captured on film for posterity. In the course of one year, he managed to accumulate more than half a million photographs, but in the end, few of them were of buildings, and even fewer have remained on display in the city itself, instead ending up in the unlikeliest places.

  In 1963 Gary Comer, an unassuming man who had grown up in Chicago and who had a comfortable position in advertising, quit his job to pursue his passion: sailing. He and a friend opened a small mail-order company that sold hardware for sailboats, and the firm did okay until the oil embargo of the early 1970s, when powerboat stores, faced with the decline in sales of their usual wares, muscled in on their sailboat business. So Comer diversified and began selling other things—first big-brimmed hats, and then clothing in general. His business took off, in time morphing into what we know today as Lands’ End. It became the nation’s largest catalogue clothing company, and Comer eventually sold the firm to Sears for $1.9 billion.

  Not long ago, in a survey conducted by the American Institute of Architects, its members declared Chicago home to the finest architecture in the country, and Comer and his wife, Francie, would agree; every Sunday they used to take a drive around the city, mostly to admire its older buildings. On one of these drives, in 1999, Comer was approaching the Loop from the south and he suddenly understood that he was watching a city shedding its skin: “I saw this magnificent façade of buildings, and I realized that what I was looking at was temporary. There isn’t much over one hundred twenty years old in the city. Most buildings last eighty to a hundred years. I realized the city was really in transition. New buildings going up. Old ones coming down.” And in that instant, Comer had a notion. “The city was being rebuilt from the center out. I thought, ‘Gee, let’s lock it into place at the end of the millennium.’ ” He decided to hire some photographers to capture the city as it was right at this moment in its history; then he might create a kind of time capsule, perhaps bury it in a canister beneath a new park under construction downtown.

  Comer approached Richard Cahan to head up the project. Cahan was a likely candidate for the job because he’d written a book about a local architectural photographer, Richard Nickel, who was among the first preservationists to fight for buildings because of their architectural rather than their historical significance. (In 1972, Nickel died doing what he loved: While he was combing through Chicago’s old Stock Exchange, bulldozers bore through the building and buried him.) Cahan, who was also the picture editor at the Chicago Sun-Times, told Comer, “If you’re going to capture the city you ought to capture its people, its life, not the architecture. That’s what people will care about a thousand years from now.” Besides, he added, “Human lives are more interesting than buildings.” Comer gradually came to agree, and so Cahan left his job at the Sun-Times to direct the project, which they christened CITY 2000.

  Two hundred local photographers were hired, most of them on a part-time basis, to take pictures around the city over the next year. Comer didn’t set a budget; he just told Cahan and the photographers he assembled to make it as good as possible. “I don’t want to hear any excuses,” he told them. Initially, Cahan skimped. When they needed aerial shots, for instance, he rented an old Piper airplane that cost seventy-five dollars an hour, but the resulting photographs were distant and out of focus. Comer heard of the problem and suggested they hire a turbo helicopter at five hundred twenty-five dollars an hour. In the end, Comer spent roughly two million dollars on the project.

  Photographers were given free rein and told to do whatever they’d long dreamed of doing. Leah Missbach asked women throughout the city to empty the contents of their purses, and then shot the contents along with the owners. Lloyd DeGrane took photos of people in uniform, from players for the Chicago Cubs to maids at the Hilton Hotel. Scott Strazzante documented the last days of a tire store where his father worked. Kevin Horan set up a makeshift studio at ten locations around the city, including outside the Criminal Courts building, by the lakefront, and on the streets of Albany Park, and asked passersby if he might photograph them against a white sheet. The result is an arresting collection of everyday people out of context. The subjects’ faces, their clothes, their postures reveal all, almost as if you’d caught them in a state of undress: two elderly women in matching pink bathing suits; a bulging defense attorney in a mustard-stained shirt; a musician with his trumpet. Horan asked each subject two questions. The first was, “Why are you here?” The second was, “What would you like people to know about that they wouldn’t know from looking at your picture?”—to which one woman, a young model, replied, “That I am really a nice person because everyone thinks I’m a bitch.”

  So, what to do with all these photographs? For two and a half months they were shown at the city’s Cultural Center in the Loop, where they were visited by twenty-five thousand people, a respectable number for exhibitions there. Then the five hundred thousand negatives were collected for storage at the library of the University of Illinois at Chicago. The collection has never found its rightful place in the city.

  Both Comer and Cahan have moved on. Comer grew up on the South Side—his father was a conductor for the Illinois Central Railroad—and during the CITY 2000 year, he visited the elementary school he’d attended. The students are now all African-American, and mostly poor. He asked the principal, “How are they treating you?”

  “Beg your pardon?” the principal replied.

  “Are you getting everything you need?”

  In fact, the principal told Comer, they had new computers that were sitting idle because the school wasn’t properly wired. Comer paid to have that done, and he has since made the well-being of the Paul Revere Elementary School an ongoing priority. He has also provided funding for the South Shore Drill Team, whose director is the school’s disciplinarian; two hundred fifty kids participate, and there are another hundred on the waiting list. They’re a crowd favorite at the Bud Billiken Day Parade. As for Cahan, he opened a store in Evanston, the suburb just north of the city. It’s called CityFile, and it sells rare books on Chicago as well as photographs, memorabilia, and original art. Cahan’s running out of money, though, and when I last saw him he told me he would probably close soon. But one of his final gestures was to hold an exhibition, the first in the city, of Robert Guinan’s work. In Paris, there’s a tradition that on weekends artists will drop by their galleries to meet with art-seekers, and so, for a month, Guinan visited Cahan’s store each Saturday afternoon and held court. A number of visitors, thinking Guinan lived in Paris, asked him how often he visited Chicago. Another began speaking to him in French. “All I could say is ’Où est le téléphone?’ ” he said. “It’s the only French I know.”

  Guinan would undoubtedly identify with the fate of CITY 2000, for the project has resurfaced far from Chicago. In September 2001, the city entered one hundred thirty-five of the photographs in the International Photography Festival in Aleppo, Syria, and the show opened on September 11—the day the world’s axis shifted. Valentine Judge, who works for the city and was traveling with the exhibition, told the Syrians that “in these pictures you see the faces of the fathers, mo
thers, sisters, and brothers of the people killed in the World Trade Center. This is what America looks like.” People were drawn to the photographs, which were the hit of the festival, and so the U.S. State Department chose to take these images of Chicago around the world—more precisely, to the places where America is viewed with some hostility. So far they have been exhibited in India, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, South Africa, Brazil, Jordan, Thailand, and Malaysia. The pictures continue to make their way around the globe.

  People, after all, like looking at people, and peeking in at American life. A photograph of a rather large woman in a body-clinging dress often gets puzzled looks, presumably because obesity is not a common sight in most Third World countries. Passersby look on in amusement at a diptych of a woman in a North Side bar called Slow Down Life’s Too Short and the emptied contents of her purse, which include a disposable camera, an address book, a pack of Marlboro Lights, a cell phone, a makeup case, a wallet, keys (to her motorcycle, car, bike lock, and apartment), a credit card, and sunglasses—the daily accoutrements of life in America. There are portraits of two waitresses, one with a nose ring, at the South Side restaurant Soul Queen; a group of Ethiopian Jews celebrating the Sabbath; two Mexican-Americans dancing at a rodeo in Pilsen; four Knights of Columbus members dressed in feathered fezzes, capes, and sashes; and Rex, a toothless, smiling homeless man in a Laborers’ Union baseball cap.

  But people also see themselves in these photos: an entire world reflected in one place, in one city. In Beirut, a woman looking at an image of two veiled Muslim women standing by Lake Michigan asked, “Isn’t that the Corniche?” In Bombay, a cleaning woman in her sari took Judge’s hand and walked her over to a picture of a nine-year-old girl about to be baptized at the Unity of Love Missionary Baptist Church on the city’s South Side; she pointed first to the shower-cap-clad girl, and then to herself. An Indian diplomat translated: “She’s trying to tell you she’s Christian. That she was baptized.” In Tunis, a middle-aged man looking at an image of a young Puerto Rican man with his wife’s name, Natalie, shaved into his hair, mumbled, “Oh, I hope my son doesn’t see that.” One of the favorites is from Horan’s collection, a portrait of two teenage friends on their way home from school: One girl is a Somali, wearing a traditional head scarf, and the other is from Thailand.