Go Blue!

Mark, interesting idea, maybe I should start referring to it as Elle.;) (It could be the shortened version of Elevated misspelled as Ellevated.:)

As a child I mentally spelled it “El.”

After starting to learn French in third grade I spelled it “Elle.’

Oh brother. I was born in Chicago and grew up in the close ‘burbs. I don’t remember there being a canonical, correct spelling for the ‘El’ (or ‘L’). It’s short for ‘elevated’ so ‘El’ seems like a perfectly reasonable rendering (How do you feel about CTA?) To get downtown, we took what my Mom called the “Skokie Swift” (though, to be honest most of the time mostly we just drove down to Wrigley).

I don’t know where you got the idea that people in Chicago take the El to Wrigley Field. People in Chicago take the “L” to Wrigley Field, and other places, but there is no such thing as the “El” (or “el”) in Chicago, and never has been.

Serious Chicago rail-fans get very worked up about this point, but I merely take it as a given. What the L?

The White Sox never had the national exposure the Cubs have had, and the South Side doesn’t attract the post-collegiate transients like the North Side does. Consequently there is less exposure to the White Sox by a constantly changing community.

While the neighborhood the “neighborhood guys” who love the White Sox has changed, they haven’t. That doesn’t mean they aren’t an interesting group. Earlier thie year I was reading the SUnday NYT at a game between innings and the neighborhood guy behind me said (in a voice that was a dead-ringer for Dennis Farina’s) “When youy’re done with that section do you mind giving it to me? There’s a story about opera I saw that I want to read.”

It’s sort of a New Yorker’s primer on Chicago class tension. I’m originally from the north suburbs (my parents now live in Evanston) and I wasn’t so much part of the north side culture, living too far north, but I definitely know the outlines in my bones. The article says, “South Siders have gone right on moaning that elites crowd into the ivied Wrigley Field caring more about getting tan, talking on cellphones and planning their post-game, North Side bar-hopping than about baseball,” which sounds about right to me, except that I don’t work on my tan. (For post-game drinking, The Half Shilling is fun, and less crowded than some places closer to the park, though still plenty crowded.)

As for the NU-Michigan game, NU has won the last three games it’s played this Fall (against Wisconsin, Purdue and Michigan State) so this promises to be an exciting Homecoming weekend.

This has always struck me as typical—Sox fans tend to hate the Cubs because they get all the attention even when they’re not very good while Cub fans mostly ignore the Sox (and this only adds to the Sox fans’ irritation).

The thing about the Cubs is that it’s this whole experience—a gem of a ballpark, a national treasure, in a great city neighborhood just a few blocks from the north side lakefront. City life the way it’s supposed to be. Play hooky from work and take the El to the ballpark, hit the pubs around the park afterwards, that kind of thing.

But the Sox—the park is right on the expressway across from some of the grimmest high-rise housing projects (now, thankfully, mostly demolished). In an era when teams were building intimate, smaller, aesthetically-pleasing parks, the Sox managed to build a new concrete monster that’s not even called Comiskey Park anymore:

http://www.chicagoarchitecture.info/ShowBuilding/291.php

On the inside, it’s not bad, but from the outside…ugh.

I’d rather go to Wrigley to see a .500 Cubs team play than to ‘US Cellular Field’ to see the best Sox team of all time. Which, in a way, is the problem with the Cubs—if they’re only decent, they’ll sell out virtually every game anyway.

But Northwestern-Michigan? The Illinois college football scene was so pathetic when I was a kid, that didn’t stick at all. Go Wolverines!