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It was a sparsely glamorous loft apartment, where the garage door was mounted inside, artfully separating the guest nook from the rest of the open living space. I peered out of the window to view the taller towers and balconies around me, and imagined what it would be like to live in a place this sophisticated. Shadows of the occupants were far enough away so that my fantasies of urban chic drifted up to the penthouses, where I imagined sleek furniture and martini glasses in every hand.
Right in front of me was an architectural provocation, a tower not rectangular but sliced instead like a thin triangle, topped by an iron balcony, where people walked slowly about. But the absence of cocktails in their hands, and the orange jumpsuits they all wore, suggested that this was no rooftop soiree. My host stood next to me at her apartment's window and followed my gaze. "It's a prison," she said. "Nobody realizes that there's a prison right here, downtown." But some people know the location quite well. On the streets down below, I saw now, scattered women and children were waving up to inmates.
In this landscape of towers, I recalled the ambitious urban planners of Genesis 11, who said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." They were wrong to think they could build their way to heaven, but in another sense, they were right. We do make a name for ourselves with our buildings, for better or for worse.
The penitentiary penthouse balcony overlooking Van Buren Street sits atop the Chicago Metropolitan Correctional Center, designed by architect Harry Weese. That rooftop must provide most of the sunlight, because the artistically spaced window slits are all of five inches wide, the maximum allowed in a prison at the time of its construction in 1975. On an architectural website where fans of Chicago's buildings get to vote to "raze it" or "praise it," 60 percent admire the structure, while 80 percent are fans of the architect's later work, the $125 million Swissotel. When it opened in 1988, the hotel sported the same striking triangular design, but the five-inch windows had been replaced with enough glass to make a silvered tower. There are no bad views from the Swissotel. Not shy to trace the roots of the luxury hotel, the architectural website gushes, "Just like the jail, a triangle was perfect for this project in order to minimize hallway lengths. Long tunnel-like hallways are a security risk in jails. In hotels they are merely an aesthetic liability."1 Did the people of Genesis know this too? Were they drawn to the tall tower with shorter hallways to put off that time in the future, when in chaos and confusion, they too would be scattered abroad?
Out in the suburbs, the jails are less architecturally majestic, and certainly lower to the ground. One county jail sits benignly amidst a large complex of county brick boxes, looking no different from the building across the way where you might dispute a traffic ticket. But housed within are 800 inmates, 100 of whom are women. Once inside this structure, you can tell you are not in the average county building. Two sets of doors send you into the secure area. As you pass from freedom into the jail, you hear the haunting slam of a door behind you, before the door in front of you opens: a grim preview of confinement in a small space, which for visitors lasts only a few seconds.
Within the secure area, there are no bars to be seen, but the walls are whitewashed cement blocks. The doors are thick, and the transparent panels must be stronger than they look, for they house guards in glass cages at all intersections. In a space with so little furniture, where hallways must be clear of everything except people, the sound echoes. The bounce of a basketball from the gym seems to hammer, the yell of a guard seems to bark, and the slamming of doors is a constant reminder that one is not free to roam.
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