Michael Gerstein

THE CITY I DREAM OF.

For many months, the pandemic gave rise to a prevailing economic story of depletion and "recovery." In this story, recovery was a metaphor that portrayed the city as a patient — its lifeblood the spending power of inhabitants and visitors. Using this metaphor, the pandemic brought not only physical illness and death, it also maimed the social body and its circulatory system. It upended the kinds of products Americans consume, the site of that consumption, the supply of labor and the very meaning of "public" and "private" as city streets emptied and the inner sanctum of our homes and apartments became offices and sickrooms. The line between work and play, "home" and "office," blurred. We wondered when things might get back to normal. We isolated ourselves.

By early 2024, downtown Chicago still had the highest vacancy rates for commercial real estate in city history. Meanwhile, many office workers only come back to The Loop three days a week — and even then, fewer than before the pandemic. But the story of life in the streets of downtown Chicago is far more complicated. This work questions the economic metaphor of "sickness" and "recovery" with a more phenomenological approach: Take a walk and see what you see. Life abides. It flows, ceaselessly. You can't step onto the same street corner even once.