Photo: Matthew Taplinger

No keys. No phone. No money, credit cards or ID. I was sitting on the ground next to Buckingham Fountain staring out toward the darkness that had taken over Michigan Avenue. Slumped up against the concrete, with muddy feet and smelling of sweat and Budweiser, I had just had the best moments of my first Chicago summer.

“What time is it?” I asked the man sitting on the ground next to me. Through his beer goggles he swayed his eyes toward me. He said he didn’t know the time or where his friends were or how he got there.

An hour before, at the MGMT concert, I had left all of my things behind and surrendered to the crowd. Finally.

For Lollapalooza 2010, I splurged and bought three-day passes. For the first two-and-a-half days, I watched a friend of mine crowdsurf during almost every set. It was getting to me. I had to do it.

So, there at MGMT, my crowdsurfing friend and I, accompanied by our mutual friend Jim (Beam), sang all the best songs off of the group’s debut album, “Oracular Spectacular.” Yet again, my friend surfed away into the crowd with a smile. Now it was time for me to decide. At that moment, a favorite song came on. With one last bit of encouragement from Jim, I handed all my belongings to a friend.

“How do I do it?” I asked her, now realizing there must be some type of proper crowdsurfing etiquette.

“She wants to go,” my friend yelled to the large men in front of me.

As they turned around and looked in my direction I squealed, “Lift me up!” Read the rest of this entry »

Irish Flag outside Pint in Wicker Park. Pint hired three Irish J1-ers for seasonal work this summer.

By Laura Hawbaker

It’s the end of May, and the invasion has already begun.

Every summer, an influx of Irish flock to Chicago. Like migratory birds, 1400 to 1500 Irish students descend upon the city with J-1 visas in hand. The J-1 is a three-month work visa for students between college semesters. Usually 19-21 years old, they seek out seasonal work—furniture removal, scooping ice cream at Navy Pier, slewing drinks in the beer gardens of an Irish pub. For the span of the summer, these “J-1-ers” work and party hard, sleep by the dozens on air mattresses, then return home.

“J-1-ers don’t tend to travel in ones or twos. They come in twelves,” says Paul Dowling, a former J-1-er who now serves as the Director of Social Services at Chicago Irish Immigrant Support.

Of the thousands who come, anywhere from 550 to 700 make their way to Armitage Hardware, its nondescript windows lined with Girl Scout cookies, tiki torches and barbecue grills for sale. They come seeking one man: Dan O’Donnell.

O’Donnell sits at his paper-strewn desk in the cellar of the hardware store. On the phone, a girl from Sligo asks, “Am I talking to Mr. O’Donnell? He’s a legend over here in Ireland.” Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone over the age of 25 who lived in Chicago in the summer of 1995 cannot forget one particularly cruel stretch that July, a heat wave which led to approximately 750 deaths over a period of five days.

As part of grappling with daytime highs that reached 106 °F, record humidity levels, and nighttime lows that never dipped below eighty degrees, the city’s infrastructure literally crumpled. Power outages were widespread and long lasting.

My elderly Italian grandmother, who lived in the Ravenswood neighborhood on the North Side, never saw a need for air conditioning, and even if she had possessed a window unit, it wouldn’t have done much good without electricity. As an immigrant and survivor of the Great Depression, she didn’t really see why my younger sister and I were whining. “If you’re hot, go sleep outside,” she offered.

At 17 years old, and on my way to beginning my senior year at Lincoln Park High School, I was literally coming of age, and melting while doing so. The idea of sleeping on the street (the hyperbole of a teenage girl) in full view of everyone was almost more than my easily mortified girlhood could stand. Forget about the public safety aspect. Read the rest of this entry »

By Daniel Prazer

A year ago last weekend, I walked across the stage and got my master’s degree in writing from Columbia College. Cranking away at a book-length manuscript tends to burn you out, a condition I referred to as the post-post-graduate writing hangover.

Less than a month later, my father took his own life. For the next few months, I sank deeper into the couch cushions.

Momentum—or the lack of it—took over my writing life. When I finally emerged from my suicide-survivor’s exile, the only words I put down on the page were cover letters to go with a redesigned resume. Nothing creative.

Until this summer, when a former professor and friend, Sam Weller, threw down this gauntlet on his Facebook wall: “I am going to write 500 words a day, every day, until the end of August. This will give me a 53,000-word draft of a novel by the end of summer. Anyone care to join me in this challenge? It’s just two pages a day.”

I decided to pick it up, to get myself moving creatively during that awful time of piecemeal employment. Sam set up a Facebook group, and the Summer Novelist’s Club was born. Read the rest of this entry »

By David Witter

Nelson Algren bought his beach cottage in Miller, Indiana in 1950, partially from the proceeds from the film rights to “The Man with a Golden Arm.” I was born on Juniper Street, across the Calumet Lagoon from his cottage a few years after Algren had left. However, tales of the man whom many consider to be Chicago’s greatest writer have echoed through my family gatherings ever since.

In a way, a lot has changed in Miller since Algren and Simone de Beauvoir drank, swam, hiked, made love, wrote and enjoyed the dunes area just east of Gary only forty-five minutes from downtown Chicago. Yet a lot has stayed the same, and it is not hard for Chicagoans to spend a summer afternoon retracing the steps of Algren in Miller. Read the rest of this entry »

By John Greenfield

On a hot August morning, I load my bicycle with camping gear and catch Metra up to Kenosha, Wisconsin. As usual I’ve stayed up late packing and haven’t slept much, so I snooze during most of the hour-and-a-half train ride.

Taking a combo of Route 32 and bike paths I ride thirty-five miles to a dock on the south side of Milwaukee for the high-speed ferry to Muskegon, Michigan. The main function of the ferry is a shortcut for drivers who want to avoid Chicago congestion, and the lower deck of the boat is packed with cars, RVs and motorcycles—mine’s the only pedal bike. Read the rest of this entry »

Summer in the suburbs was sweet. On a half acre sheltered by towering oaks and dense shrubs we could perform whatever outrages we wanted and never see a neighbor without a formal invitation. Our daughter would sunbathe topless on the veranda roof with impunity, our errant son would hold drug-infested raves in the far back that the police pretended not to notice, and our artsy friends would commit abominations all over the lawns and porches free from public scrutiny.

When we moved to the city summer changed. Now we have a deck instead of gardens and terraces—a large deck, granted, but encroached on every side by other decks and porches and balconies, leaving us exposed and vulnerable. On one flank barely twenty feet away a sexy twentysomething sunbathes topless while her aging potbellied boyfriend wears an obscenely skimpy Speedo. On another side consultants from Chelsea Clinton’s firm host multinational MBAs with little in common but their True Religion jeans who chat with us across the void rather than face each other.

Deck etiquette challenges us daily. Do you greet your neighbors when they are relaxing five feet away, or respect their privacy and ignore them? Can you sit out in your pajama bottoms to read the morning paper? Is the bottom of a two-piece bikini adequate cover-up for women of a certain age? Do we introduce our guests, and do we need to muzzle our more outlandish ones? Do neighbors’ wind chimes assaulting our ear drums constitute a justifiable condo association grievance? Can I shoot my neighbors’ garrulous father-in-law, Cheney-style, when he peppers us with reminiscences of his life as a Houston orthodontist? Just because our deck offers the best views, does that mean the neighborhood kids are entitled to invade for every fireworks display and air show?

It’s trying for everyone. A fast-track young exec and his gorgeous girlfriend have to share an atrium patio with a family that includes two ADD boys under eight. A techie abandons his patio to his pugs, leaving angry neighbors retching. A misplaced social conservative across the alley emails me that we are all bound for hell.

I wish I could offer solutions, but there’s no Emily Post for decks. Navigating deck etiquette, like much else about summer in Chicago, seems just another trade-off for the excitement of living here: what you like most about it is also what you like least about it. (Burt Michaels)

By Michael Nagrant

In May of 1995 I’d just completed my freshman year at the University of Michigan, a year that kicked my ass faster than the thirty-second first-round drubbing Mike Tyson gave Marvis Frazier in 1986. It was the second hottest summer on record in the Detroit area since 1870. As a child of air-conditioning (the ambient temperature in my parents house always hovered at sixty-eight when my father wasn’t kvetching over electricity bills and worrying the thermostat), and with no window or central AC unit in my cheap summer rental, a second-floor walk-up, the incessant heat of that summer wrung sweat from my pores like water from a dish towel. Sporting a constant sheen, I would have been a perfect extra in the Kathleen Turner and William Hurt noir film “Body Heat.” It was also the first time living away from my parents without academic responsibility and I was ready to blow off some steam. Read the rest of this entry »

By Selena Fragassi

Lesson #1: Don’t get existential on hot summer nights, you’ll just sweat more
Of the many dumb questions I’ve been asked in my life, there is one that takes my attention this evening: If I was on a deserted island, what top five records would I take with me? Of all the times this has been asked by lame music interviewers and lamer dating Web sites, why has no one wondered where you would plug in a stereo on this island?

This is where my head is on a late August night after two days without electricity. I long for any sound besides whining sirens and an army of cicadas buried in the trenches outside my window that is propped open with a PBR for ventilation and any “in case of emergency” situations. Read the rest of this entry »

By Ray Pride

Johnny Ratones is humping my leg with quiet urgency as I simmer on the porch swing waiting for Sally to come from the kitchen with the smokes she’d stowed just above the freezer with the taped-down tearsheet of Johnny’s Cash’s extended digit. Even in the worst neighborhoods, sitting on the back porch on summer can be the most romantic escape. I miss having my own back porch, I think, as lightning lights, thunder cracks. The filthy black Lab hopes to bite into my thigh as I shake off his embracing forelegs.

It’s late July and as humid as dew on an impossibly small and perfect peach. Small soft drops scatter. This is how I like summers to be. Read the rest of this entry »