Oh That Magic Feeing: Chicago

August 8, 2007

I am staying over in Chicago so that in the morning I can visit an exhibit on Medieval Islamic ceramics at the Art Institute of Chicago. Tonight I just wandered around downtown for a while. Chicago is certainly a contrast with Detroit.. where I was this morning. I thought Detroit was cool, but Chicago is a "destination" city.

An odd fact: in Dearborn I stopped at Borders to find a guidebook for Detroit, and.. there were none! I found guidebooks for New Orleans, New York.. and tons of them for Chicago. But there was no help for me with Detroit—even in Detroit! The obvious inference is that Detroit is not the hottest city to visit. But there is something to be said about visiting cities that do not have lots of guidebooks.. and I loved exploring Dearborn, and would love to continue exploring Detroit itself. That sense of exploration is what I love about travel.. and it is enervating to see crowds of vacationers on the streets of Chicago. It is obviously a well tracked city.. and I prefer the less well tracked.

Last week the DailyKos convention was held here in Chicago and several of the bloggers that I read regularly were present. Matt Yglesias made the following comment:

[I already] don't understand how I ever walked around an unfamiliar city without by iPhone's google maps function. Also glad nobody's stolen the phone yet.

I had never thought about the way an easily portable version of Google maps could function as a guidebook. I am sure as people accumulate and contribute knowledge about favorite restaurants, hangouts, and museums that this will become a great common guidebook for many cities. But there is a downside: this popular version of the city will become canonical and it will be tough to conceptually break out of this Google version of a city.

I like a good map, but I like to fill in the spaces on that map with my own exploration.. even if that is sometimes inconvenient and time wasting. The "destination" tourist version of the city is limited.. and I would hate to see that version choke out historical, ethnic, or working class patterns of experiencing the city.. and even more personally, I like the sound of that Beatles line, which I often hear in my head: "Oh that magic feeling, nowhere to go.."