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It's funny how, wherever there are tourists, there are ghosts.
In Chicago, two ghost tours put titillated tourists on the track of Al Capone and John Dillinger, thrill-killers Leopold and
Loeb and serial murderer H.H. Holmes, the Devil in the White City. There's enough lingering ectoplasm in Dubuque, St. Paul,
Wausau and Winnipeg to keep guides busy there, too, especially around Halloween.
Even sweet little Galena, Ill., has so many ghosts that guides stay busy year-round, telling tourists about beckoning figures and haunted theaters and mysterious taps on shoulders.
Everything that’s worth doing, you can do along Chicago’s lakefront.
Seniors in Speedos climb out of Lake Michigan after swimming laps. Chess players hunch over boards in a 1957 pavilion that
looks like the Jetsons’ carport. College girls fumble with kayaks in the shadow of yachts, and boys play beach
volleyball.
Overhead, a biplane pulls a flapping beer banner through the sky.
Is this Fort Lauderdale? No, but you couldn’t tell from the string of beaches, golf courses and marinas.
In the grand scheme of things, Galena, Ill., was destined to be a flash in the pan.
The flash came from the shiny lead sulfide upon which the town's fortunes were built in the 1830s, '40s and '50s; galena is the Latin word for the ore. It made many people rich, and in the 1850s, Galena, three miles from the Mississippi, was the busiest port between St. Paul and St. Louis.
The new railroad approached, but the steamboat lines made sure it stayed away from Galena. Then the lead market weakened, trade routes shifted and the town's steep hillsides, which had given up their trees for the smelting furnaces and their limestone for houses, began to erode into the Galena River. By 1910, the river had shrunk so much the steamboats couldn't get through.
One Memorial Day weekend, my friend Grace and I went to tour "ethnic'' Chicago. But we'd only been there a few hours before we realized everything about Chicago is ethnic.
Chicago is a mosaic, a city of neighborhoods settled by waves of immigrants who arrived to dig its waterways, build its railroads and work in its slaughterhouses. One of its first neighborhoods was Bridgeport, settled by Irish canal workers in the 1840s and the stronghold of Mayor Richard J. Daley and his son Richard M. Daley, the current mayor.
It was followed by Little Italy, Germantown, the Swedish enclave of Andersonville, Polish Village, Ukrainian Village, Chinatown, Greek Town, Bronzeville, the East Indian zone on Devon Avenue and Pilsen, a Czech quarter that now is heavily Hispanic.
To a would-be tour guide, Chicago is as shifty as a kaleidoscope.
The city has so many facets, in so many splendid configurations, that no one can predict what anyone will like best. Especially to a child.
During spring break, my friend Rebecca and I took our children to Chicago, with an itinerary that cunningly alternated visits to museums with visits to zoos and parks. Pitting high culture against popular culture, we knew what the biggest hits would be: the Ferris wheel, the zoo, the elevated train, deep-dish pizza, perhaps the Museum of Science and Industry.
Just 15 minutes from the tourist playground of Galena, a young woman scrubs a cast-iron pot with a corncob.
Another woman sews the ticking for a straw mattress. Over an open fire, a man carefully pours molten lead into a mold, which he opens to reveal a shiny new musket ball.
Today, the village of Elizabeth, Ill., sits on U.S. 20, the well-trod path that brings hordes of Chicagoans to this picturesque corner of Illinois, across the Mississippi River from Dubuque.
Chicago has come a long way since it was hog butcher to the world.
There was nothing very appetizing about early Chicago. The factories and slaughterhouses that made it grow also made it stink. Rotting carcasses made the Chicago River bubble; a glass of water came with a side of cholera.
But the city grew up. The immigrants who packed its meat, dug its waterways and built its railroads moved on and were replaced by new immigrants, who settled in places that became known as Little Italy, Andersonville, Polish Village, Ukrainian Village, Chinatown, Greek Town and Pilsen.