Ten minutes of heavy jackhammering provides a not-so-complementary backdrop to the classical music issuing from my radio alarm at 7:02 a.m. It doesn’t happen every morning, fortunately, in the construction zone where I currently live. Deconstruction Zone would be more accurate. Allegedly, it will someday become a Reconstruction Zone, but I don’t live in the future. I live in the Now, where wreckage extends four blocks of what was previously known as Oak Park Avenue, two blocks either side of the Metra/CTA embankment.
Folk wisdom says you must break some eggs to make an omelette. We are squarely in the broken-eggs stage, but A Lamp Road Builders has assured us the omelette will arrive by Thanksgiving — A Lamp at the end of the tunneling. Meanwhile, despite its similarities, this is not hell, which is a place with no hope and no meaning, though I can’t speak for the local shopkeepers and restaurateurs who are undergoing the ordeal with a larger stake in it.
My apartment overlooks one intersection of the wreckage, and my building’s front door opens onto it. I’ve lived here for two decades and always thought of Oak Park Avenue as a river, a steady stream of hissing tires on pavement and whatever clatter their inelegant engines add — slightly quieter in the wee hours, but not by much. Police cruisers, ambulances, and firetrucks favored it to exercise their wailing sirens, the music of my nights. Motorcycle decibal-lovers would let loose their anti-social tendencies, as did drivers with high-intensity stereo systems at full volume. Now hot wheels and muffler-less road warriors must find another venue for their noise orgies. Lately, it’s been strangely quiet here at night and on weekends. The stillness takes some getting used to.
But construction commotion makes up for it during the weekdays. Enormous work vehicles rumble awake and dump trucks arrive in the staging area with squealing brakes, overwhelming the pre-dawn songbird symphony.
Soon the vehicular parade strikes up the band of wheezing, snorting, revving engines, accompanied by the steady bleat of backup beeping. One would swear they only operate in reverse gear.
I rise to shut the windows, which mute the sounds slightly and also prevent the riled-up dust from coating my furniture and floors. Doesn’t matter how nice the weather is outside, there is no such thing as “fresh” air in a Deconstruction Zone. Most days it is replaced by a cloud of diesel exhaust hanging heavy in the air.
The ballet of backhoes and front-end loaders begins. Dump trucks maneuver around small mountain ranges of gravel and hills of dark topsoil underlying the crust of concrete and blacktop, a reminder that our paved paradise is but an impermanent illusion, the good earth below quietly chiding us with its patient permanence.
I emerged from my brick-and-mortar bunker one day, stunned to find my block had become a treeless plain. Gone were the pear trees that turned into a lovely cloud of white blossoms every April and every October transformed into technicolor brilliance. Gone too were the Locks of Love so lovingly rusting beneath the overpass, a testimonial to committed relationships. But there is no place for romance in a Deconstruction Zone.
Not gone, however, are the memories cemented by walking these sidewalks for the past 36 years. There is meaning in memories, even among the ruins. And though it’s tempting to view this disruption as a microcosm of our nation’s current state of decomposition, there is hope here that it will lead to something better — hope that businesses will survive and benefit from this unraveling, even though good old Tony scowls at the wreckage as he climbs, after a long day, from the cloistered dungeon where he works his magic, raising footwear from the dead.
Before we can advance to the streetscape stage, however, there is more dismembering, disassembling, and discombobulation ahead, governed by orange-striped “horses” that blink all night, illuminating the “Road Closed” barriers. During the day, workers in yellow hard hats and greenish-yellow safety vests, cluster here and there studying the latest excavation, shouting an occasional directive to the drivers. The backhoe labors like a lethargic, domesticated dragon, feeding on the good earth and piling it aside for the front-end loader to scoop up and load into a waiting dump truck. The work is rhythmically easy-going. There is even a small mechanized robot that toddles back and forth, dutifully followed by its toggling overlord, whose mission is unclear.
The holes serve as graves for gigantic gray concrete cylinders, presumably replacing the obsolete subterranean infrastructure that has served its time and will now rest, rusted and forgotten, in some designated industrial graveyard that none of us want to think much about, even though we once depended on it mightily.
This will get old very fast but, as the survivors of Barrie Park can attest, it too will pass. The banks of our Avenue river, once teeming, will bustle again when this necessary purgatory is finished.
The local merchants, meanwhile, are still open for business. As are the sidewalks, fenced off from the mayhem and craving foot traffic.
It should be an interesting summer.