Neighborhood Focus: Trout Alley.
A more detailed look at one of the neighborhoods in my fictitious US Midwestern city, one that combines many of my favorite things—real-life Chicago’s Wicker Park in the early 1990s, the cyberpunks of the late 1980s, the beginning of the Dot Com age, and the messy history of urban gentrification
#jasonpettus #experimental #literary #mediamedia #project #storytelling #citybuilding #universebuilding #cityplanner #metafiction #fictitious #city #metropolis #usa #us #america #midwest #winnemac #sinclairlewis #ai #image #generator #troutalley #gentrification #victorianage #fishery #industry #dockside #warehouses #abandoned #postwar #whiteflight #cyberpunk #larp #raves #underground #indierock #hipsters #coders #startups #tech #industry #dotcomboom #neptune
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One of my points of this Progress storytelling project is to take a look at the real history of Chicago, where I’ve lived the last 30 years, only to do it as a “funhouse mirror” reflection of the city as it might’ve existed in an alternative reality. For me as someone who moved here in the early 1990s, Wicker Park is a prime example of something interesting to be examined through the funhouse mirror of the Progressverse, because there’s lots of fascinating things to look at there and unpack and more deeply examine, when it comes to such varied subjects as gentrification, the corporatization of hipsterness, how and why an artists’ neighborhood transforms into an “artsy” neighborhood in the first place, why this is both good and bad for both preserving historic architecture and for building cutting-edge new spaces, and more.
In my universe, for example, there’s a neighborhood called Trout Alley that goes back almost to the city’s founding in 1845. It is in fact the home of the very first industry that becomes a huge, roaring success in Progress, the fishing industry, which catches on right at the same time that meatpacking starts catching on at its partner in the “Lake Michigan Sister Cities,” (real-life) Chicago. That means that instead of the first generation of millionaire immigrants being Germans and Poles like in real-life Chicago, Progress’s version is the Scandinavians (mostly Swedish) who founded and owned the fisheries. There were vast docks for these endless boats throughout the second half of the Victorian Age; then next door was the neighborhood where all the working-class Swedes who actually worked the warehouses lived.
(And yes, as mentioned yesterday, Progress also had a smaller meatpacking industry in these same years, in a similar neighborhood called Slaughterhouse Row; in my universe, Chicago continued to be a hugely dominant force in that industry at first, until their famous real-life Great Fire of 1871, at which point much of the business switched over to the Progress side of Lake Michigan. But still, Chicago recovered quickly, and neither city ever managed to do greater than a 50/50 split of the industry again with the other, yet another thing that’s led to them being [unofficially] called the “Lake Michigan Sister Cities” for over 200 years now.)
In good news for the industry, but bad news for the neighborhood, starting in the 1950s and concluding in the ‘70s, a far northern fishing wharf at the edge of the metropolitan area started getting rapidly upgraded with post-war technology; first a high-volume cargo train depot, then a highway truckstop to interact with it, then a cargo airport, and finally a heavy-duty intermodal cargo container industrial ship dock, the whole campus’s infrastructure tied together and now called the McKinley Wharf Seafaring Complex. Over these three decades, then, all the old fishery companies of the 1800s moved out of Trout Alley and up to these modern facilities; and of course many of the immigrant families who lived next door were abandoning the neighborhood in these decades too, the so-called “white flight” to the suburbs that happened after World War Two. By the late ‘70s, it left the neighborhood an abandoned, empty shell, which the city government couldn’t deal with because they had their hands full with the riots over in Slaughterhouse Row (see yesterday’s entry for more), a favorite destination for local authors to set the climax of their gritty crime drama, an elegantly decaying part of the city that time had apparently forgot.
But here’s where I get to combine some of my favorite activities and subjects of my youth all together into one uber-Mary Sue way (by which I mean I really, really wish the following had been true in real life and a place where I had actually lived); for in the Progressverse, a big initial wave of late-1980s cyberpunk people start interacting with the computer hackers, live action role players (or LARPers), and indie rockers (called “college rockers” in my universe) within these abandoned warehouses, for things like illegal raves where everyone is on Ecstasy, or LARP nights where everyone wears their best Mondo 2000 costume and run around the neighborhood shooting at each other with bright neon lasertag guns. That was my complete vibe back in the actual ‘80s and ‘90s, first in Missouri in college and then in Chicago, so I absolutely love bringing this aspect to my big open fictional universe and the city I’m building from scratch there.
Of course, this was before the web, so the way info got spread back then about underground events was often through postcard-sized flyers, which starting in the late ‘80s got cheap enough to do in full color for the first time; in the images here above, for example, I’m envisioning such glossy postcard flyers that would get passed around about the LARP group that plays out cyberpunk storylines on Saturday nights in Trout Alley using lasertag guns. You’d be able to find these flyers at your local record store, skateboard shop, drug paraphernalia store, weekly poetry slam, daily coffeehouse, being used to chop up cocaine at a warehouse party, etc etc.
But especially with the coders and hackers being involved in this scene, that brought the very first wave of tech startup companies to Trout Alley too, starting right after the turn of 1990. And those places found that the old owners of all those buildings, who had long ago stopped trying to lease them, were suddenly ecstatic about having a clean new company moving into one of the spaces, and paying primo dollars to get the space back up to code. Although all the nerds and hipsters and skateboarders were still there, the space became cleaner and brighter and most importantly safer, and started getting populated more and more by the first wave of big tech companies that occurred during the Dot Com age. Don’t forget, in my universe, Progress had just as many successes in the early Dot Com years as northern California did, leading to the common cultural phrase “Silicon Valley and Trout Alley” to describe the synergy between the two areas in these years; so Trout Alley was filled at the time with what would become the Web’s first Yahoos and MySpaces and those types of companies.
Although the Progress storytelling project is purportedly telling the history of the first 200 years of the city, those exact years are actually 1845 to 2045, which gives me a chance to do a little fortune telling and imagine what will happen in the city in the near future. So “these days” (the 2040s, according to the wiki), space within the actual old 1800s warehouses (what few are left, at least) are scarcer and pricier than ever, and to be honest can really only be afforded anymore by big restaurants and tourist stores; all the tech companies have now moved to cutting-edge skyscrapers right next door, a neighborhood surprisingly enough called “Trout Alley East.” It’s a major center of wealth in the city, and much of what makes our modern world work anymore can be found headquartered here.
Of course, let’s not forget, like I mentioned yesterday, Neptune was one of these small startups found in Trout Alley in the Dot Com age, which was doing just fine and making lots of money; but then the idiosyncratic founder, Jasper Quinn, is going to start getting obsessed with something that I haven’t made up my mind yet about, but it will be a big pivot into something that has the capacity to make them a trillion-dollar company by the 2010s like Apple or Microsoft. Maybe…chips? Maybe they’ll be my universe’s version of Intel? After years of having offices scattered throughout the world, Quinn decides in 2016 to consolidate everyone into a brand-new facility that seems out of science-fiction, the so-called “Megascraper” that very easily becomes the tallest structure the human race has ever made, but then surrounded by thousands of acres of wildlife that the company owns and is choosing to remain untouched. No cars allowed, even electric ones; everyone parks in a guarded lot miles away, then takes either a monorail or a blimp in. They’re a huge and mysterious company who do lots of weird things, like buy an entire giant parcel of land out in the unincorporated woods in order to build a private planned community of homes for all their executives, next door to a special blimp public transit station built just for their employees, that will shuttle them directly over the city to their office in a matter of minutes. But we’ll finally be talking about all that in more detail in tomorrow’s entry.