Why We Love Chicago in the Summer
Well, why do we? For starters, just step outside. The lake is sparkling, the air is warm, people look genuinely glad to be alive, and the city crackles with activity. Here are just some of the reasons why we love Chicago best right now
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...Because Grilling Is The Chillest Way To Cook.
If you don't see chef Paul Kahan at Blackbird (619 W. Randolph St.; 312-715-0708), he may well be nursing a beer and mopping his 'cue from a lawn chair in his backyard.
Paul Kahan's Pulled Pork BBQ
- 3-pound boneless pork shoulder or butt, generously salted and peppered all over (or brine it overnight, as Kahan does)
For the sauce:
- 3 tablespoons honey
- 3 tablespoons molasses
- 3 whole garlic cloves
- 1 teaspoon cumin seed
- 2 teaspoons coriander seed
- 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorns
- 1/2 teaspoon red chili flakes
- 2 teaspoons fennel seeds
- 2 star anise pods
- 1 bay leaf
- 1/2 tablespoon tomato paste
- 8-ounce can plum tomatoes with juice
- 1 1/2 cups white vinegar
- 3/4 cup water
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- Sriracha sauce, to taste
Place first ten sauce ingredients in a pot and simmer on low for 30 minutes. Add tomato paste and tomatoes and simmer for 15 more minutes. Add vinegar, water, salt, and sriracha sauce and cook, covered, over low heat for 3 hours more, stirring every now and then. Place your pork on a grill, which has been preheated and set on low, indirect heat (about 225 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit). Baste well with sauce and cover. Flip the meat and rebaste every 30 minutes. Grill until the meat is nearly falling apart-about 8 hours.
I have loved the white sox for almost as long as I have loved my parents. Granted, this is a patently ridiculous statement. I don't really know anyone in the Sox organization. And if my parents had torn down my childhood room in 1991, gone on strike in the middle of our best year (1994), and given up on me completely in 1997-not to mention, over the course of six months each year, systematically crushed my hopes and dreams-I would have stopped returning their calls years ago.
But that's the thing about baseball: it doesn't always love you back. In fact, it's less like your folks and more like the girl you ached for in junior high, the one who didn't know you existed, which made you only want her more. After 88 years of unrequited Sox love, we finally got some affection back last October, and it shifted our world in such a profound way that we reverted to primal acts. The moment Bobby Jenks recorded the final out in the World Series, I bit my brother's arm. I bit him. I didn't know what else to do.
Now, Sox games just feel . . . different. During my first trip back in The Cell this season, a beautiful night game against Minnesota, I knew that everything had changed. First of all, it was packed. And loud. People were rowdy and jovial and not just cheering when the electronic scoreboard told them to. Most noticeable, though, was a new aroma in the air hanging over the whole ballpark. It was an earthy, unmistakably masculine smell that wafted from the players to the crowd, from the crowd to the ushers, the ushers to the vendors, the vendors to the guy selling funnel cakes in section 110. Even the zit-faced ticket-tearer had it. It took me four innings to realize what the odor was, because I had never smelled it before in Chicago: it was confidence.
When the Twins' notorious Sox killer, Torii Hunter, crushed a Freddy Garcia fastball over the left field wall that night-an event that would have led to groans and whines in the past-the crowd all but shrugged. Don't worry about it; we're the champs. We'll be OK. One World Series and we've all turned into unabashed optimists. Sure enough, two innings later, Jim Thome answered with a two-run blast into the partying right field bleachers to put the exclamation point on the evening. Sox win. See? I told you.
After the game ended, the stadium lights went off, the crowd went bonkers, and fireworks painted the sky over 35th Street. To me the fireworks shows of the past were nice enough, but they always felt kind of desperate, every noisy explosion another nudge to North Siders: Hey, look at us! We've got a ballclub down here too! This time, even I had to admit: that blast of color was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
–Jeff Ruby ...Because We're Not Above Partaking In The Cheesy Attractions At Navy Pier.
Photograph: © Jason Lindsey/Alamy  |
As tourist destinations go, Navy Pier is a lumbering, smelly, and loud behemoth that happens to be squatting on one of the most desirable stretches of lakeside real estate in the city. Most Chicagoans I know shun the place, except perhaps for jaunts to the Children's Museum or the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. But during the summer months, there is one more reason to endure Navy Pier's pandemonium: the Wave Swinger.
Sandwiched between the Pier's carousel and Ferris wheel, made of what seem to be a few dozen legless dinette chairs hanging by chains from a tall, rotating shaft, the Wave Swinger is the quintessential carnival ride. Climb on, lower a lap bar, and soon your chair lifts 15 or so feet off the pavement. As the shaft begins to turn, you are quickly on your way to being flung outward like a ball at the end of a tether, your legs dangling, the breeze in your face, the coast of Chicago twirling before your eyes.
With the wafting aromas of popcorn and burnt sugar, this really is the essence of summer, our own Coney Island or, from my California girlhood, Pacific Ocean Park. I love it, and my preteen son isn't even my excuse to ride two or three times in a row, nonstop. (In fact, when we've braved the hours of traffic jams to visit Six Flags over the years, I'm the one crazed with excitement and anticipation. He waits patiently for me at the base of the Viper, Iron Wolf, or American Eagle, eating ice cream.) I have been known to stop at Navy Pier for a quickie on my way home from a meeting or between errands, an easy, satisfying, but furtive thrill.
Be warned, though: avoid Navy Pier on the weekends, when the sweat-drenched crowds are roiling, the parking snafus are infernal, the lines are long, and the gooey foods underfoot can suck the flip-flops right off your soles. Even riding the Wave Swinger isn't worth the aggravation. Not even three times in a row.
–Victoria Lautman
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