Bow. James Bow.

As I mentioned earlier, McCormick Place is a massive convention centre redevelopment in Chicago’s South Loop that appears to have bulldozed several blocks of old city land. Indeed, I suspect that McCormick Place is so large, Chicago could have New York over for a visit. It dwarfs Toronto’s convention centre by an order of magnitude.

It also, I have to say, reminds me terribly of Hull’s Place du Portage.

Way back when I was in grade seven, my father went to a librarians’ conference in Ottawa and took my mother and me along. To keep me entertained, my mother took me on a tour of Ottawa’s bus system (yes, I was a transit geek, even then). I’d noticed that OC Transpo’s buses crossed the Ottawa River into Hull, and as I had no memory of ever being outside of the province of Ontario, I asked if we could pay a visit to the province of Quebec. So we took the bus to the end of the line.

Big mistake. Although Hull’s downtown is said to be nice, our bus bypassed the downtown and continued on to a government complex overlooking the Ottawa River that I suspect was built to survive a nuclear attack. The buildings were concrete slaps, the doors were all recessed and hard to locate, traffic screamed along the roads with the noise amplified by all the hard surfaces, and there were no other pedestrians about. It was cold. It was unpleasant. And we caught the next bus and got the heck out of there. I wouldn’t leave Ontario again for another ten years, paying a visit to the much nicer city of Montreal.

I get the same vibe here in McCormick Place. The inside of the Hyatt Regency is posh, but the design of the place is clearly skewed to getting people indoors as quickly as possible. Covered bridges connect the buildings at several locations. The car traffic screams along Martin Luther King Drive. They’ve taken the step of boxing in an elevated expressway to spare us from exhaust fumes, and they’ve gardened up the sidewalks, but walking along the sidewalks along King Drive, you face nothing but slabs of concrete and glass. And, tellingly, there are few other pedestrians. Which is not a situation you want to have after dark in a city like Chicago.

Which is a double shame because McCormick Place is right next to a charismatic community called Bronzeville. This web site has more information on the history of Bronzeville:

The black area of the south side of Chicago was originally called as the “Ghetto” by outsiders. However, the “Ghetto” is a harsh term, carrying overtones of poverty and suffering, of exclusion and subordination. In the Midwest Metropolis it is used by civic leaders when they want to shock complacency into action. Most of the ordinary people in the black belt refer to their community as the “south side” , but everybody is also familiar with another name for the area ——- Bronzeville. According to Cayton and Drake of the Black Metropolis (1945) , this name seems to have been used originally by the editor of the Chicago Bee, who, in 1930, sponsored a contest to elect a “mayor of Bronzeville.” A year or two later, when this newsman joined the Defender Staff, he took his brain child with him. The annual election of the “mayor of Bronzeville” grew into a community event with a significance far beyond that of that of the circulation stunt, in which tens of thousands of people used to participate. In 1944 - 45, a physician was elected mayor. It was after this in 1945 that people started to use the term “Bronzeville” for the Black Metropolis because it seems to express the feeling that people seem to have about their own community. Cayton and Drake also say that the expression “bronze” when counterposed to “black” reveals a tendency on part of the Negroes to avoid referring to themselves as “black”. And, of course, as a descriptive term the former is even more accurate then the latter, for most Negroes are brown. Hence in conclusion we can say that the term Bronzeville was brought about to give the Black Metropolis the much needed upliftment and also so that people would not keep looking down on it as the “black” neighborhood.

Bronzeville proudly calls itself a minority neighbourhood, and what I’ve seen of it defies the stereotypes you might have of the Chicago south side. New townhouses and condominiums are moving into the area, and prices are jumping up. Martin Luther King Drive becomes a lot more walkable once you cross under the boxed in expressway and actually encounter buildings which face onto the street. There’s a McDonalds near the expressway which we’ve eaten at twice, now (the first time during our St. Patrick’s Day visit earlier this year — see the picture above), and its walls are covered with art depicting famous African Americans and community leaders. And we’ve had interesting conversations there.

Back in March, we met a woman who was going through a bunch of pictures, working on a book about the history of Bronzeville. She was more than happy to talk to us about the community, and the migration of African Americans it saw following the Civil War. My mother-in-law talked to her about a book that she had read, the award-winning Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis, depicting the life of the first child of the underground railroad born into freedom in the Ontario community given over to the former slaves.

And earlier today, while we went out to have breakfast (the McDonald’s is the least expensive place in walking distance) an older gentleman happened by to show us a bottle of sugar-free syrup that he’d brought to have on his hot cakes, saying that it was a shame that McDonald’s didn’t offer a sugar-free variant for those who were diabetic, especially considering how diabeties is more prevalent in ‘minority neighbourhoods’. This lead to a conversation about how much sugar there was in McDonald’s food in general, as shown by Morgan Spurlock’s movie, Super Size Me.

It is the stereotype that big cities are impersonal, that strangers talk to each other as little as they can get away with. But that’s not the case here. Bronzeville feels like a open and friendly community, and I think that comes through pride.

I’m writing this post from west Kalamazoo, where we stayed the night after driving out towards Chicago. For the next few weeks, we’ll be hopping around Iowa and Nebraska, visiting Vivian and Nora’s other grandparents. For now, we’re heading for Chicago, where we’ll meet grandpa Michael and grandma Rosemarie and stick around for the fourth of July weekend.

Despite losing our computers and passports during our last trip, I’m looking forward to seeing Chicago again. Among other things, I’m finally going to have a chance to visit the Illinois Railway Museum. During all of my previous visits to Chicago, we’ve never been in town at a time that the museum was open — or, it was, but we were leaving that day, et cetera. It was like a curse. But that curse gets broken on this trip. I hope.

The trip down was uneventful. Traffic was light all the way, even though the weather was wet. There was congestion at the border, however, with cars backed all the way up the Bluewater Bridge. Was it all holiday travellers? Or was security extra tight in advance of the fourth of July weekend? I noticed that more than a few vehicles were asked to pop their trunks, allowing customs officers to search inside.

I should note that Nora is on the verge of walking. She’s actually taken her first toddling steps earlier this week, and she has long been sidling around while keeping her hand on the furniture, or standing up and looking pleased about herself, but she clearly still prefers crawling (it’s faster). But we’ll probably see Nora become a full-fledged walker by the end of this trip. It looks as though Grandma Rosemarie is going to be the grandparent who gets to see this moment.

(Update: 3:15 p.m. CDT): Made it to Chicago in time for Lunch, which we ate at the Adler Planetarium. Took Vivian to see her first movie there as well: Sesame Street’s One Sky, One World, a Chinese-American co-production featuring Big Bird, Elmo and Elmo’s Chinese equivalent. Among other things, Vivian learned that the sun is a star, and they pointed out the Big Dipper and the North Star. Despite our fears that Vivian would freak out, she did very well, as did Nora.

We’re booked into the Hyatt Regency hotel at McCormick Place, which had a deal on. McCormick Place is a recuperating part of town. They’ve clearly planted a major convention centre over top a much older neighbourhood, and you can see clues of that older neighbourhood. Outside the window of my hotel, I’m looking at an old industrial building (1920s, I think) that’s facing onto a street that doesn’t exist anymore. We have a good view of the Chicago skyline as well.

Grandpa Michael and Grandma Rosemarie are en route; last time we checked, they were due to arrive around 5:30, so we might head out to dinner.

But after about ten hours in a car with two young children, I have to say that I am taking any opportunity I can to put my feet up.

And I’d like to add: a happy Canada Day to all of my readers. I hope yours was a good one. In terms of Canada Day stories, few can top this one.

More than a few people have noted, with frustration, that the death of Michael Jackson and the sideshow of his passing, has deflected the world’s attention away from Iran. I share their frustration. The timing is such that one could even put together a tinfoil hat conspiracy story about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad having Jackson assassinated, knowing what the Western media would do next. Oh, look, a shiny thing!

In Iran, the situation looks grim. The regime has instituted a communications blackout, essentially trying to shut down the Internet in order to stop the dissidents from communicating and associating. Journalists, protesters, opposition politicians and others have been jailed and there are reports of torture. The group Avaaz.org has tried to help by providing funds towards anonymous proxy services. These services provide Iranians with a secure link through which they can access the Internet and keep the lines of communication open. The Iranian government is trying to shut these down, however, and it’s a game of whack-a-mole. I’m rooting for the mole.

In Avaaz’s own words:

We urgently need to help Iranians get back on the internet to have their voices heard in Iran and the world. Secure and anonymous “proxy services” are helping people to bypass regime controls and get online — but they’re overloaded and running out of funds.3 A small donation of just $10 can provide bandwidth for hundreds of secure emails - if 10,000 of us donate in the next 72 hours, we can help break the blackout:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/iran_break_the_blackout.

Proxy services provide people with a single link at which they can freely access the internet. The link is changed every time the regime blocks access to it. With 10,000 donors, we can scale up the proxy services massively — providing more servers, bandwidth and advanced technical support.

There are signs of hope in Iran. The clerics are not unanimous in their opposition to the protesters. As long as we stand up to the regime’s attempts to block open communication, to thwart freedom of association and freedom of speech, democracy has a chance to blossom in Iran. I’ve donated $25. So I challenge you to take a break from the Michael Jackson media watch and offer your support to the people of Iran.

Further Reading

• Aveez.Org: Iran, Break the Blackout.

A couple of weeks ago, Albertan Finance Minister Iris Evans led us to believe that she knew better how to raise our kids than we do. In her words:

“They’ve [her children] understood perfectly well that when you’re raising children, you don’t both go off to work and leave them for somebody else to raise. This is not a statement against daycare. It’s a statement about their belief in the importance of raising children properly.”

(link)

My initial reaction was to say, and I quote: “I’m thinking there’s a reason why we’re finding so many dinosaur bones out in Alberta.” Of course, that’s not fair to the millions of Albertans who don’t fit the stereotype. And, besides, Ms. Evans has since apologized for her remarks.

But I cannot let this remark pass without comment. Ms. Evans would have us believe that the number of two-income families out there, where the children spend a lot of time in daycare without parental supervision, could lead to increased mental illness and criminal activity. Now, I stay at home with the kids, and Erin works from home as often as not, and we would have to dispute this. If anything, I wonder if the correlation is less the number of daycare hours a child receives (or, conversely, the number of parental care hours the child doesn’t receive) and more the hours of television the child watches.

Here in this household, we have pulled the plug on cable television. We just don’t have it in the house. What television we receive either comes in off of an antennae (which means we get the CBC, CTV and TV Ontario), or through DVDs and downloads. So, what television Vivian has received has been strictly educational (or, as educational as Dora the Explorer can be).

Now, I have to confess, in moments when our parental juices have been in short supply, we’ve planted Vivian in front of the television with her favourite television show (currently The Magic School Bus) for an hour’s peace. And as educational as The Magic School Bus is, I have to wonder how much of the lessons take. Is she instead watching the colours and pictures, and not really taking in the science content? Because she can become a little anti-social after watching too many of these. And the experience she gets just does not compare to the richness of the experience received if she just spends time outside playing with her best friend Natalia, or at the University of Waterloo’s pre-school, where television sets are not in evidence.

So, I would have to say that I’m particularly irked by Ms. Evans’ (even if inadvertent) dismissal of the value of daycare. There are probably good daycares and bad daycares out there, but the thing children need the most isn’t specifically time with a parent. They need time being enriched. There’s a reason why they say that it takes a village to raise a child. Vivian’s best times are the ones when she’s socializing with other children. And that’s something that doesn’t come automatically just because one parent happens to be home.