I’ve been away from State Street for two months and I’m eating my words. Some of these words, written shortly after my May move to an apartment share with friends in the Fulton River district (read: across the street from trust-me-it’s-stinkier than-you-realize Blommers Chocolate factory.) I’m merely a mile west on Kinzie Street from my former Marina City digs, but the difference couldn’t feel more marked, and not in a groovy I’m-in-a-better-place way, either.

I moved due to the economy, with my game plan centering on exiting consulting, getting a day job, and moving on to the cheaper, more neighborhoody pastures of Lincoln Square on the far-ish North Side–my apartment share with friends an interim stop along the way. The day job element of the plan still holds–I’m pretty tired of being in charge of my own health insurance and taxes. But the leaving downtown thing? Not so much.

This makes the third time that, try as I might, I just can’t drag myself away from downtown Chicago. First, I failed to move back to New York after a terrific 2007 job offer there–I figured I’d wake up screaming the names of Chicago ‘hoods and missing being able to walk to the Art Institute. Then I bailed on moving in with former boyfriend Pastry Chef Chris because I couldn’t bear to trade living a bridge away from the Loop for living a 15-minute hoof to an Oak Park ‘L’ station.

You’d think I’d have learned by now.

There are two things at work here. Most of all, I miss being able to walk out my front door and be in the middle of the capital of the middle of America. Knowing you’re a short walk from any Loop attraction, from (as most people don’t know) half a dozen great grocery stores, or from a one-seat bus, ‘L’, or Metra ride to anywhere in Chicagoland is pretty powerful. I said it in 2007 and dammit, I’m saying it again: I can easily visit outer-neighborhood trees, restaurants, and friends, but I’d prefer to sleep in the skyline. Call it the New Yorker in me, but I’m a raging urbanist at heart and I’d come of as far less locationally fickle if I would stop questioning that fact.

I’m also learning that, although I think there are many things woefully wrong with Marina City and the way it’s run (just look through my Marina City archives), I can’t fault the building staff. At all. You’ve got to love a condo high-rise with a daily cleaning schedule, a live-in 24-hour engineer, a  responsive door staff, and regular exterminator visits.

In two months at my temporary, supposedly luxury digs in the high-rise rental K Station development, I’ve witnessed dirt sit in hallways and garbage sit in trash rooms for a week at a time, the engineering staff scoff at fixing broken appliances, and the door guards walk away from their posts for ten minutes at a time in the middle of the night, leaving the security door to the elevator lobby locked open.

Things are no better at Overly Frank’s new South Loop pad, where I visit from time to time. Whenever the 56 bus bothers to come down Milwaukee or I make the 10 minute walk to the Clinton ‘L’ stop to wait another 10 minutes for Green Line train into the Loop, I can make it from Kinzie and Desplaines to 1130 South Michigan in…the same time it used to take me to get from Marina City to Frank’s old place in Lincoln Park.

Once at his Yolk-topping high-rise abode, I always need to make sure the Elphabugs aren’t present before I kick off my shoes. I call them that because the giant flying roaches the building is well known for on apartment-rating web sites may someday band together, levitate, and overthrow the roach wizard. Last night while I was catsitting for Frank, I briefly shared a bathtub with one of them.

Life would have been easier if it had been small enough to go down the drain. It being, however, the normal dimensions for an 1130 South Michigan roach–approaching a Glade Plug-In propped up on hairy black bobby pins–it took a ten-minute drenching and a half a can of Raid to stun the crayfish-sized thing enough to grab it with food tongs and flush it down the toilet. (I started out with a quarter can of Raid, but when I came back with the tongs, it raised its five-inch antennae and started to twitch.)

I pulled the chain twice, then took a whore’s bath. Any part of me I couldn’t reach with a washcloth I powdered and moved on. Then I slept on the couch with no part of my bedsheets touching the floor.  Say what you want about Marina City, but at least there when you throw a shoe at the vermin it doesn’t get picket up and thrown back at you.

It’s not a ringing endorsement, but it works for me.

(Photo: And so I go–my last moment in Marina City.)

Two weeks ago, I moved into an apartment share with friends in the Fulton River district. On Saturday, more friends helped me move the balance of my stuff into storage. On my final way out, I took one last photo of my empty 38th-floor unit and wondered why I wasn’t feeling any sense of pathos. And that’s how five years at downtown Chicago’s high-rise Marina City corncobs ended for me.

The change was long in coming. I’ll be 40 soon. Ever since turning 39, I’ve had a sense of a somewhat early mid-life crisis. I’ve spent most of a year wondering how I arrived at this place in my life and questioning my understanding of myself. Not that I’m in a bad place, but I’m sure living through a time of change. The economy erased most of my communications consulting business, and my ADHD-laden shock froze me in place to watch even more of that business fade away. And with my income in a tailspin, my dumpy but pricey downtown studio apartment–and all the costly yuppie amenities that go with it–quickly became a stretch to afford.

I wasn’t necessarily unhappy about either U-turn in my life. When you stop denying the fact that you’re having one, a mid-life crisis can turn out to be a useful thing. Over the past few months I came to see that my longstanding assumptions about who I am, what I value, what I’m capable of, and what I want out of life changed while I wasn’t paying attention.

Five years ago, after a strong-arm mugging in Logan Square made me afraid of the quieter streets of outer neighborhoods, I moved to the busier environs of Marina City to enjoy downtown while safely buffered by electronic security doors and lobby guards. I have always gravitated towards the downtowns of major cities, but that’s not really why I moved to the downtown of this one.

At the same time, I met Devyn, a wonderful, equally downtown-leaning man with whom I shared a lot of common interests, not the least of which was taking a lot of my self-definition from my location–my skyscraper neighborhood and my mid-century knock-off apartment.

Most of all, five years ago I found my voice. I began this blog and discovered I was a writer–and a good one. Devyn had a popular photo blog and I was jealous. So I channeled my New York City mouthiness online, and came up with Chicago Carless. My newly recognized ability to write launched me into an unexpected local and occasionally national career in strategic public relations.

And I loved it all for only about half the time I had it.

When Devyn left for New York in 2007 (we remain in touch, he’s doing fine there), I knew my times they were a’changing. But I didn’t want to let go just yet. (Losties among you, feel free to flash on the last shot of Ben refusing to get off that bench.) As time has passed, I’ve felt less attached to downtown, less identified with my New York origins, and less eager to ram my opinions down everyone else’s throat. The piss-and-vinegar of my early thirties became increasingly tempered by my ongoing march through life. My codependence recovery. My ADHD diagnosis. My growing Buddhist belief that I’m more than I give myself credit for being.

I continued on auto-pilot for a couple of years. Then, finally, I realized how inorganic my life had become. None of the reasons that got me where I am resonate for me any longer. Some of them don’t even exist anymore. So instead of mourning my finally arrived part in the Great Recession, I figured a much better idea might be to let it all go, and set out in search of a truly sustainable life.

I love downtown, but I love Chicago neighborhoods, too. In fact, I spend most of my free time in them. And while I’m a great writer and strategist, if I never pitch a story to another reporter as long as I live, I won’t miss media-relations in any way. Most of all, while I’ll always cherish my New York origins, I also cherish my Chicago friendships and professional relationships. It’s not a fine line between blogging and bloviating, it’s a big, fat, wide one, in fact. Calling myself an ex-New Yorker isn’t just cause to constantly traipse across that line just to drag my point across with me.

My goal is to get out of the consulting world and put my shoulder into a day job with an upstanding nonprofit or commercial firm, and later this year reunite with my stored possessions and settle into a modest, low-rise, garbage-dumpster-out-back studio in the wonderful, local wilds of Lincoln Square. That and maintain my treasured friendships and social circle while I’m at it.

I’m blessed with knowing two open-hearted former Michiganders who in no uncertain terms have welcomed me into their home–demanded, in fact, that I move into their spare room and remove myself from another few months of Marina City rent. So until I get things back in order, I’ve traded a view of West Tower for a panoramic view of the northwest Loop and every Metra track out of Ogivlie and Union stations. When I go, the former transit planner in me will miss spending far too much time staring down at the tracks during rush hour watching the trains go by. (But not so much the nonstop candy smell from Blommer’s Chocolate factory across the street.)

With all this change, though, I think I deserve a little consistency, too: none of this means I’m about to run out and learn how to drive. That’s still the most sustainable life choice I ever made, and I’ll continue to make other life choices based around it.

In the end, I suppose I don’t feel a sense of loss at leaving Marina City behind because like the rest of my life, I haven’t felt at home in it for some time. I’ve said good-bye to the place little by little over time without even knowing I was doing it. My unexpected experiences residing there will always be archived here on Carless to remember. The Gary Kimmel Scandal. The building creaking. The incessant noise. The crazy neighbors. The awful maintenance. The notorious board. The spellcheck-shy management office. The lovely couch ladies. The incredible roofdeck. And though I wouldn’t move back, for all the insanity that goes on in those 61-story hair curlers, I’m grateful for my time there.

In a way, Marina City was my incubator. It helped insulate me from certain aspects of life, certain lessons I wasn’t ready or prepared to learn yet, in order for me to be able to move forward in other ways. Now, I’m ready to come down from the tower, get my feet back on the ground, and re-engage with the rest of my life. I’m happy/scared/hopeful/ready…and can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to it.

Wish me luck.

(Photo: As a nub these towers were born, to a nub they may yet return.)

Nine days ago my Marina City apartment almost burned down. Besides awful, that would also have been ironic since I had only just gotten done blogging about the folly of Marina City management replacing evacuation maps with laundry room memos throughout the 61-story East Tower (my tower), and the spate of recent high-rise condo fires in downtown Chicago.

Right before I left for the Chicago blogging community’s Ugly Sweater Christmas Party, I saw a flash of light on my balcony. I assumed it was someone’s first-time visitor taking a photo of the city from a neighboring West Tower balcony. Evening flashbulbs happen a lot at the corncobs during holidays, so I didn’t pay much attention.

I didn’t even remember the flash when I got back home six hours later. But two hours after that, I wondered why my TV and everything else plugged into an outlet in my living room and hallway suddenly stopped working. I tried to reset the breaker to no avail. Each time, the circuit tripped–and my cat wandered over to my floor-to-ceiling windows to peer outside. I texted the landlord of the problem, rewired my TV and computer to working outlets on my kitchen circuit, and went to bed.

The next morning I remembered the flash of light from the night before and finally clued into why my cat kept walking over to the windows. Sure enough, the balcony outlet had shorted out–big time. There was black char and evidence of burning on the outlet cover and up the back of the timer I was using for my balcony lights.

I was horrified to realize every time my cat walked over to the balcony, he was probably seeing another burning flash from the outlet that I couldn’t see from the breaker box in the back of my apartment. And that the outlet had probably smoldered for eight hours–six of which I wasn’t even home.

Lest you think an arcing balcony outlet does not an apartment burnout make, let me assure you–here at Marina City, that can easily be the case. If it weren’t for the old Marina City wives’ tale that our concrete and old-school plaster apartments take six-to-eight hours to burn through, the age of our wiring and electrical hardware would makes me nervous to live here. (In fact, a neighbor about 15 floors above had an apartment fire from a faulty outside outlet that caused the fire department to break down her door while she was out.)

There are three punch lines here. First, the landlord couldn’t fix the outlet when he arrived three days later to check on the problem. Though he did rip the old outlet off the wall and leave me with taped hot and neutral wires dangling in midair.

Second, because Marina City was designed in the late 1950s and opened in 1962, the outside outlet…wasn’t a modern, outside, all-weather outlet. But for good measure, was wired into an inside power circuit, meaning no fewer than 5 outlet boxes and 10 sockets couldn’t be used in my apartment until someone fixed the outside box.

That someone turned out to be me, with the advice of a DIY website and an Ace Hardware employee and a healthy dose of trepidation. Well, really, scared-out-of-my-freaking-mindedness that I would manage to make the apartment burn down anyway from my debut outlet-replacement skills. That didn’t happen, and the new, weatherized outlet and my internal power are all running smoothly. The original culprit seems to have been the age of the outlet and winter weather–most likely, ice and/or condensation forming in the unused socket.

That third punch line? The irony of hearing a hovering helicopter and emergency vehicles nearby while I was out on the balcony rewiring my faulty outlet. I kept thinking, “That sounds like another high-rise fire response.”

It was. And just by the skin of my teeth, it wasn’t for me.

(Photo: It isn’t as if River North hasn’t burned down before… Credit: Cushman Collection.)

This week, it was tongue-in-cheek that I wrote about Marina City covering over its emergency evacuation posters with laundry room memos. The same night I wrote that, a fire broke out on the 29th floor of a neighboring residential high-rise on Wabash Avenue. Then last night, a major fire in a condo tower in Streeterville killed one resident and injured 12 other people.

Now three days later, my blog post doesn’t seem so funny. I wish someone would explain to me why the management of a residential high-rise would ever think that covering up evacuation maps on every apartment floor for any reason–much less to announce the opening of a new laundry room–would be a good idea. The maps were covered over for more than a week in Marina City’s East Tower, and a West Tower resident tells me the management company did the same thing to announce that building’s new laundry room.

I guess that’s the way it always goes here at Marina City. Just when you think the nonstop shenanigans have died down, yet another questionable act occurs. Personally, I’d take pimp dentists over burning to death in the hallways any day.

Or night, for that matter.

(Photo: Is this cute polar bear worth dying for?)

This news nugget is short, sweet, and highly stupid. Monday morning now marks eight consecutive days that management here at the Marina City corncobs has covered the legally required high-rise emergency evacuation maps in the complex’s East Tower with a cute-polar-bear-emblazoned laundry room memo.

The backstory: last week, the Marina Towers Condominium Association completed a month-long renovation of the 20th-floor laundry room in East Tower (the residential condo tower fronting State Street.) During my four-and-a-half years residing here, ordinarily when announcing official news the Draper and Kramer-run management office  directs building maintenance staff to slip individual memos–usually printed on condominium association or management office letterhead–underneath the approximately 450 apartment doors in each tower.

Maybe the official office printer ran out of ink. Instead, last Sunday, November 29th, a flyer similar to the above-pictured memo appeared in front of the legally required evacuation maps in the elevator lobbies on every single East Tower residential floor from 21 through 60. They announced the opening the following day of the new East Tower laundry room–which promptly flooded, thanks to a workman who didn’t bother to hook one of the new washers up to a drain.

But I digress. Here’s the incredible part. After breaking the law (wait for it) by covering up 40 floors of emergency evacuation maps with cute polar bear memos, a second memo–like the one pictured above which I found on floor 37–was posted in the evacuation-map holders, replacing the first, and continuing to hide the legally required maps.

Here’s a cuddly close-up:

The only difference between the two memos? This one announces the laundry room as already open (instead of “opening tomorrow”.) Although the memo displays neither a date nor a condominium association nor management office letterhead marking, as you can see, the content is clearly of an official nature. Unless we have a resident here at the corncobs who’s highly committed to letting their neighbors know about laundry room news by walking up and down 40 floors with a stack of memos every few days, I’d like to know who else is responsible for this memo and its predecessor?

If you look really closely at these photos, you can even make out the emergency evacuation map the cute polar bear is swimming on. But to save you the strain, here’s the very map that was sitting beneath the above memo:

And, in case you were wondering, the Chicago ordinance that makes this cute polar bear memo illegal is amended Title 13 of the Municipal Code of Chicago, Chapters 13-78, otherwise known as the Evacuation Ordinance for High-Rise Buildings. Find a summary here.

Better yet, download–and read–the entire ordinance as a PDF, here. I did. Here’s what I found–none of which would make that polar bear very happy.

Apparently, the Marina City corncobs are Class A (residential) Category 2 (from 540 to 780 feet tall–each Marina City tower measures approximately 585 feet) towers. That means they’re required to have official emergency evacuation plans in place and on file with the city’s Office of Emergency Communications.

Most importantly, Section 13-78-080 lays out the minimum evacuation plan requirements. Sub-section (c) here specifically requires:

“…the creation and posting, in all elevator lobbies, of the high rise building’s core floor plan, showing floor-by-floor corridors, stairways, evacuation routes, areas of rescue assistance and elevator lobbies. With respect to residential high rise buildings, the core floor plan also shall be made available to each residential unit for posting inside the residential unit.”

That means, in vulgar parlance, evacuation maps. You will notice, the subsection says nothing about cute polar bears–who are now, sadly, public offenders.

Equally interesting to me as a longtime Marina City resident, Section 13-78-100 (b), on the distribution of evacuation plan information in residential buildings, says that residents should receive annual copies of the official evacuation plan. And Section 13-78-090 (b), covering safety drills, specifies that buildings like Marina City should conduct safety drills at least once a year.

As far as I know, neither of the above legally required actions occurred at Marina City last year–or this year, for that matter.

So it’s probably also worth noting Section 13-78-110. That’s the section on enforcement. Let’s skip down to Sub-section (c):

“(c) Any violation of any provision of this Chapter shall subject the owner, tenant, or other responsible party to a penalty of not less than $500.00 and not greater than $10,000.00, for each separate and distinct offense. Each day that such violation continues shall be considered a separate and distinct offense.”

If the city were actually paying attention to any of this, those might turn out to be 80 very expensive polar bears…

With the freak-show weather we’ve been having this summer in Chicago, I knew it wouldn’t be long before the Windy City ended up topped in a John Carpenter-esque layer of fog. It’s one thing to watch the Sears Tower (’til the grave, folks) disappear into the murky whiteness from below. It’s quite another to stand atop one of Marina City’s twin, 61st-floor open-air roofdecks and try and make out the Chicago Loop from inside the aerial fog bank, itself. Odd. Eerie even.

(Video: “We were aided by an unearthly fog that rolled in, as if Heaven sent, although God had no part in our actions tonight. Blake’s gold will be recovered tomorrow…” The Fog, 1980.)

Living in the corncobs, I’ve had that experience many times before. This perilously vaporific morning, I headed up to the East Tower roofdeck with my Flip ‘corder to give you an idea what it’s like to wonder where in all heck Chicago went from 550 feet above downtown. To see what’s missing in today’s video, take a look below at the video blog I shot one sunny day back in April from the exact same vantage point.

Dramatic weather changes are among my favorite reasons to live in Chicago. It’s not like I ever heard the weather sirens go off in New York to signal a funnel cloud. Although next time I flee from one (or stand on my balcony waiting for death), I’ll be sure to hit the record button…

(Click the HQ buttons for higher-quality videos. RSS subscribers, click here (fog walk) and here (sunny walk) to view the videos on CHICAGO CARLESS.)

(Photo: Sometimes the things we say don’t come out the way we intend.)

People say the strangest things to me in downtown Chicago. This past weekend was a trifecta. Sunday afternoon I ran into Marina City’s own Vincent Falk, aka the colorful, tour-boat-waving Riverace (rhymes with Liberace), standing together with Marina City Online scribe Steve Dahlman mid-span on the State Street Bridge.

“Vincent, do you know our neighbor, Mike Doyle?” asked Dahlman. “He’s another famous blogger in the building.”

“Of course, but he looks sad today,” replied Vincent, fingering my navy pullover. “See? He’s blue!”

Long ago I learned no one approaches Riverace without being badly punned. Dahlman chuckled.

“Dahlman, I can’t believe you laughed at that,” I said. “Even Vincent doesn’t think it’s funny, and he said it.”

I had just traded emails with Dahlman earlier in the afternoon, cajoling him for not commenting under the feature I wrote about him and his blog over at Chicagosphere. For someone with a local reputation built on trading condo gossip (I knew I liked him for a reason), he definitely has a tendency to soft-shoe his self-promotion.

He also has a tendency to bury the lead.

“Hey, I forgot to tell you, I’m getting married!” he cooed as we retreated from Vincent towards Wacker Drive.

“You’re what?” I asked, incredulous.

“Yes, me, getting married,” Dahlman answered.

“To a woman?” I asked, still not getting the memo.

Dahlman did his best Judy Tenuta in reply. “YEEEES!” he snarled in my direction.

“You didn’t tell me that before because why?” I asked.

“It slipped my mind,” replied Dahlman.

More likely you wanted to be sure you were ready for the news to be public knowledge before telling me, I thought. “Is this off the record?” I probed.

“Not at all,” Dahlman continued. “We’re aiming for August. She’s a really nice woman, my age–mid-forties, a nonprofit executive. She almost as much as asked me. There’s just one problem.”

Just the one? Thankfully, that was my inside voice.

“Tell me,” I said.

“We’d like some space, but I can’t leave Marina City,” Dahlman lamented. “The access to write about these buildings is too good to leave behind now. We need a two-bedroom somewhere in the towers.”

Only 16 out of Marina City’s 80 floors of apartments even have two-bedroom units, so I understood Dahlman’s dilemma: marriage or Marina City, but potentially not both.

I managed to muster, “Congratulations, anyway!” as I continued down State. I was on my way to dinner with Matt Countant, my bean-counter friend from West Tower. I hoped for the evening to be less contentious than the last time we hung out.

Lightweight that I am, I knew not to share a bottle of wine with a native South Sider. But the curiously dry gyros we were served at the usually amazing Parthenon last week needed to be washed down with something.

As Matt tried to guide my tottering form back towards Marina City, I told him how wondrous it still felt after four years in the towers to spend an evening out and be able to walk back home completely in downtown Chicago.

“We don’t live in downtown,” was Matt’s immediate response.

Oh, no he didn’t. “What are you talking about?” I asked. “Of course we live downtown. Where do you think downtown starts?”

“Inside the ‘L’ loop,” said Matt. “That’s downtown. Everything else is just near downtown.”

Am I, like, drunk and high, too? “Huh?” I verbally furrowed. “Don’t you think North Michigan Avenue’s downtown? That’s way north of where we live.”

“Well, I guess that’s downtown,” said Matt. “But not exactly.”

I’m being Punk’d, that’s got to be it. “What about the skyscrapers in the West Loop?” I protested. “The office buildings surrounding Marina City in River North? The CTA map’s downtown inset, for crying out loud?”

“There’s a difference between office districts and downtown,” Matt replied. “Let’s just agree to disagree, neither one of us is right or wrong.”

The drunken urban planner inside me had the urge to shake him right then and there. “That’s what you think,” I hissed before stumbling.
__

Yesterday afternoon when Matt and I met up again at Buckingham Fountain, my foot-in-mouth syndrome was far more immediate.

“Can you take our picture?” asked two lovely, young African-American women standing next to the railing of the enormous, iconic fountain.

“Sure,” I replied, taking hold of the camera. Matt stepped aside as I lined up the shot.

And with all due respect to the memory of Kate and Clarence Buckingham, I have no idea what possessed me to utter my next words.

“…What do you want behind you?”