Yesterday, I blogged what I expected to be my last words on living in Marina City. I didn’t expect to be called home from the office today by our management company to attend what is our third apartment flood in 12 months. Silly me. After seven years of blogging about state-of-repair disasters in both towers–including numerous fires, floods, drunken attempted apartment invasions, and at least one interstate prostitution ring abetted by former board member and local dentist Gary Kimmel, I really should have known better.

If you think I’m kidding, please (oh, please) browse through my Marina City archives–from beginning (in June 2005) to end (this month)–or read this recent coverage of the Gary Kimmel scandal from Chicagoist. Sadly, it doesn’t get any better. At least not in these corncobs. If you look at an apartment here, either to rent or to buy, ask the person showing it about these issues. If they–or anyone else–tell you things like this don’t happen here, they aren’t telling you the truth. Do your you diligence. One word: Google.

Today’s events just bolstered my sense of relief about finally leaving this place. But as with everything, there’s always a blessing if you look for it. As I wait for the residual dripping from our newly damaged window-wall ceiling down directly into our electric baseboard heaters to putter out, one comforting thought keeps coming to mind.

At least we don’t have carpeting.

(Can’t see this video in your news feed? Watch it here.)

In the photo above you can see our current Marina City balconies. They’re no different than most other balconies here, so there’s no need to point them out. As you can see, there’s an eternal consistency to life here at the corncobs. Some of that consistency I’ll miss, and some I’ll be glad to leave behind. Ryan and I have signed a lease on an apartment in Edgewater Beach for March 1st. We signed the lease a couple of weeks ago. It just took me a while to realize that this is the end of an era in my life.

We’re moving because we realized that our lives are centered elsewhere–primarily on the far north side and the northern suburbs of Chicago. North is where our synagogue and most of our synagogue friends are. North is where the heart of the Chicago area’s Jewish community lies. North is where most of the restaurants and stores are located that we like to frequent. After a year living in Marina City and more than a year of living Jewishly, it just turned out that Milan Kundera was right. In our case, life really is elsewhere.

I’m looking forward to the move. For years I’ve blogged about the consistent agony and ecstasy of life in the Marina City corncobs, and all of it still applies. You always know your neighbors. Via foot, ‘L’, bus, or expressway, you can easily get anywhere from here. The architectural and cultural wonders of the Chicago Loop are your front yard. And the 61st-floor roofdecks are sublime.

However, an eternally combative condo board, nonstop punishing noise from every-fifteen-minute emergency sirens and late-evening Chicago Riverwalk cafe music, fraternity-level antics from numerous college-age residents, a noticeable lack of neighborhood amenities, and the persistent feeling that once you step outside your lobby, the block belongs to hipsters lined up to get into the House of Blues and drunks stumbling home from Dick’s Last Resort, bring any sense of soul soaring right back down to earth.

So I suppose, at long last, these are my final words on Marina City. I was thrilled to move into Marina City in 2005, but in the end, I agree with my last last statement about living here. It’s cheap and well located, but it’s not worth the quality-of-life trade-off you have to make to be able to live here and keep your sanity. Unlike last time, though, this time I’m leaving on my own terms. I won’t be back.

We’re off to an apartment twice the size of our current one for only slightly more rent, in a Sheridan Road high-rise with a spectacular city and lake view. It’s near two of our favorite supermarkets, the Red Line is two blocks away, and an express bus is outside our front door. But what really matters to me is that we’ll be living on the same block as our synagogue. For at least one Reform Jew, gaining the ability to walk to synagogue on Shabbat–and in five minutes, too!–really will be a dream come true.

But far north side living is a far cry from a lot of my life that came before. Growing up in New York, it was my life’s goal to live as close to Manhattan as possible. Eight years living in Park Slope, Brooklyn, satisfied that urge. A graduate degree in urban planning sealed my then-permanent anti-suburban sneer.

During the past nine years in Chicago, it’s been much the same thing. First I tried to live as close to downtown as I could get. Then I moved into it, and for seven years downtown is where I’ve remained. A boyfriend moved to New York, but I stayed. I moved out of Marina City once already, but I still stayed downtown.

But life goes on, and while doing so it changes us, little by little, until it changes us a lot. For many years, I haven’t been an urban planner. Over time, I’ve realized how much more I like Chicago’s outer neighborhoods–and suburbs, too–than I ever liked their New York counterparts. And in converting to Judaism and joining a synagogue, I did something I never dared do back in my hometown. I put down roots. Those roots just happen to be planted in soil that isn’t in the 42nd Ward.

And so. I guess this is the point where Mike Doyle, the post-college, agnostic, pessimistic, inner-city, out-of-place Gothamite is finally let go of by Michael Doyle, the forty-something, religious, optimistic, city-as-neighborhood, where-he-belongs Chicagoan. Who I’ve been for a lot longer than I’ve let myself realize.

I guess I’ll never be an urban planner again. Or a New Yorker. Or maybe even someone with a 15-minute walk to work. I’ll never brag about living in a Goldberg building again, or meditate on my life from the panoramic roofdeck of one. There are a lot of “I’ll never agains” when you reach past forty, I’ve come to see now.

On the other hand, I’ll never again wonder where and how I’m supposed to fit in on this planet. I’ll never again feel lonely in a room alone. I’ll never again face a challenge, yell “Why?” in my head, and fear there’s no Eternal being out there to hear me cry out. I’ll never again hate the suburbs like I used to. I’ll never again fear outer neighborhoods like I used to.

And you know what else? I’ll never again fear moving on like I used to, either.

When I moved on from my formerly beloved high-rise home, Marina City, last May, I never planned to be back. At the time, drowning in the watery surge of the tsunami of the Great Recession, I decided greener, more northern, and, er, cheaper pastures would be in my future. Lincoln Square seemed more bucolic. Edgewater was a lot closer to my temple. And after five years living in Chicago’s (in)famous, twin corncobs (regarding the ‘in’ part, just read through my Marina City archives), I needed a break from living in the dead-center heart of the middle of urban America.

Three months later, living with roommates at the foot of Milwaukee Avenue, tantalizingly close to downtown but not really in it anymore, I started to reconsider my decision. But I was still too poor to do anything about it, and too humble after my emotional and spiritual leaves (after forty years finally) turned over midyear to do anything about it. And spending time in Edgewater, I really started to fall for the neighborhood vibe of the place. In many ways, it reminded me of the local-neighborhoodiness I gave up when I left Brooklyn in the early 2000s.

By year’s end, I started a volunteer position managing the web presence of a major local nonprofit that very quickly turned into something more. (I’m not at liberty to flesh out further details yet, but suffice it to say, I can let my Link card expire now.) But I had spent a lot of time loving on the vibe of Chicago’s northern neighborhoods–and a lot of time doting on the noise, scandal, and troublesome condo board at Marina City. So downtown still wasn’t in the picture.

I had forgotten about the community spirit of the corncobs’ longtime-resident couch ladies, the comfort of knowing so many of your neighbors (don’t ask why, but Marina City in all its 60-story glory seems to promote neighborliness), the security of being on a first-name basis with building staff, and the sheer convenience of having five supermarkets and the entire Windy City transit system within a short walk from your front door.

I was reminded of all these things when Ryan, whom I love and–for once–whom you haven’t heard all about, suggested we have a living-room picnic a few weekends ago. We visited my old Trader Joe’s, on Ontario Street in River North, just up the street from Marina City. He almost had a heart attack from the crowded, Saturday evening bumper-shopping-cart action. But I started to remember how much I missed it, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot along with it. (Oddly enough, Jeff Tweedy, lead singer of Wilco whose so-named album featured the towers on its cover art, is a member of my temple.)

Gainfully employed, I had already started planning my move to Edgewater. At the same time, Ryan wanted to move closer to his Berwyn job than his current Aurora home. We decided to look for an apartment together and move in (now there’s a buried lede for you), and mused that maybe we should look downtown. But we really figured we were going to move in together in Edgewater.

Until Trader Joe’s.

So in February, for the first time ever, I’ll live with my boyfriend. And we’ll be living in Marina City’s West Tower. So remember all that yapping I did in 2007 about yearning to move home? Well, I’m finally doing it. Just not to New York. But back to where, in the end, I guess I really belong. Downtown Chicago.

Also…yahoo.

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.