For as strong as the imagery of the sodium vapor streetlights stretching to infinity is in my mind, I actually have relatively few shots of them—even in the late night hours when I tend to shoot this work, it still wasn’t terribly wise to stand in the middle of the street trying to get this shot. But an especially quiet night yielded this . . . with the mid-century buildings on the right a bonus.
The contrast of the lights with what I think of as “old Chicago”—brick taverns, workers’ cottages and the like—were always something I was looking to take more photos of. The south side still has more of this Chicago than most corners of the city and this particular former Tied House was a subject in particular that I’d wanted to get some more photos of. Besides just the light, this working class “City of the Big Shoulders” has disappeared from the city as well.
As I wandered the city at night, trying to document her, I was always looking for both remnants of the old industrial Chicago as well as any opportunity to juxtapose that old Chicago with the modern city of glass and steel.
An underappreciated part of the fabric of Chicago’s neighborhoods—at least if the development push of the last 20 years is anything to go on—are the dwindling multitudes of three- and four-story stone and brick buildings lining her main arterial streets. It’s not often I can “hear” a photo, but looking at this, I can hear the buzz of these lights reflecting off that stone.
Algren talked about that “calamitous yellow light” filtering through the tracks of the L and while I’ve documented it several times, never as on this rainy winter night.
Chicago’s railroad bridges are a subject I’ve long been fascinated with—to young eyes, they felt ancient beyond belief, like the bones of some long gone beast. The image of a hundred-year old hunk of iron, bathed in the light of sodium vapor is, to me, a quintessential Chicago image.
This was shot on the West Side but I feel like there was a time I could have seen this in almost any corner of the city: old factories, viaducts, and streetlights stretching to infinity.
It’s hard to imagine a part of Chicago that’s changed more over the years than Goose Island. On this cold January evening, this old warehouse felt like the prow of an old ship, silently awaiting its fate.
Chicago’s railroads were also a favorite subject of mine—my dad worked for the railroad when I was a kid and I grew up learning more about them than is probably healthy. But it was also the combination of this knowledge and my fascination with the city at night that led me to photography in the first place.
Being a native of the north side and having grown up in Oak Park, the south side was long something of a mystery to me. But as I ventured further and further afield documenting the city, I increasingly spent more and more time here. While I’m well aware of the economic and urban planning debates as to the cause, I’ve long appreciated the feeling that there you could still see Chicago “as it was.”
It’s easy to forget just how yellow the golden glow was until you were reminded of it—and the glow was never stronger as after the rains passed through.
This was the actual photo that inspired the “digital vs. analog” comment. And while I took it to illustrate the encroachment of the LED lights and their effects on the environment, I’d long been fascinated by Chicago’s viaducts—they’d always felt ancient to me, like visiting the catacombs of a long forgotten civilization. And as the lights of the LEDs begin to encroach on even this scene, perhaps that civilization is indeed fading into history.