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You did not read that description incorrectly. Independence Day, until very recently, was celebrated on two different days in Chicago. The main celebration downtown took place on July 3, which would throw and frustrate newcomers to the city no end, as they'd arrive a day too late to see anything in the loop, and then wouldn't have time to get to anywhere else, but there was a logic to it, that fit the city well, well enough that the newcomers accepted the mishap. The fact that there would be fireworks down at Navy Pier for the rest of the summer probably took a little of the sting away.











One would go downtown on the Third, and then catch the show in one's own neighborhood or suburb on the Fourth. The point was to keep the downtown celebration from taking people away from their own local celebrations, and that was in keeping with the local culture. The usual contrast drawn, when Chicago is discussed, is Los Angeles, in that Los Angeles, supposedly has no downtown, even though some of us have walked through it, gasping for breath while doing so, but still ... But let's go with that, even if it is an exaggeration. Chicago, as a city that grew up before most people have cars, doesn't sprawl the way that Los Angeles does, but it also didn't develop exactly the way New York did. There is no local equivalent of Manhattan, no one focus of all trendy life, with all else considered a little declasse, if only by the Manhattanites. No, Chicago has traditionally been an intermediate case, a city of definitely urban neighborhoods, each with an identity of its own, not as centralized as New York or Boston, but far more so than Los Angeles or Phoenix. The boundary between Lakeview and Lincoln Park might get a little fuzzy, but there were no mysteries about when one left Hyde Park. The well aimed beer bottle headed in one's direction usually gave one a firm clue.

To drag people away from the local celebration would have been to undermine the cohesiveness of the local community, and that wouldn't have sat well with people who cared about that community, or with their aldermen either, in all likelihood. The two day celebration might be read, by an outsider, as an expression of over the top nationalism but no, Chicago is a little too blue state-ish for that. It's more about the pattern of development that allows the existence of comfortable neighborhoods within easy walking distance of the downtown. On any level, why mess with something that works?











Comfort and safety in Chicago are, at best, relative, and there is no denying that there was some decidely obnoxious behavior at the main event. Each year, I remember a pair of gentlemen, one black and one white, who would get into the same fist fight that would end in the same way, with the two of them grabbing ahold of each other and spinning around, while the crowd scattered from them as if they were ten pins. But there was a predictability to the chaos that one could pick up on - the trouble clustered along the lake, drunken thugs staking out their turf, and refusing to let people rejoin their friends, once they went up to get refreshments. The thugs, probably none too bright when sober, never seemed to notice that the view was much better uphill, just on the other side of the drive, high enough that those of us who avoided the mob scene below could look down on the thugs in every way, with far more elbow room. They never thought to join us, a fact for which we were grateful. Even our mutually racist pugilists could be counted on - they always moved toward a stretch of lower ground that pointed toward a particular bend in the Drive. Maybe it was their place. Having learned to stay out of that place - where we had no reason to be, anyway, because the view from there would have been terrible, artificially constructed ground rising to block any line of sight toward the Lake - we found that we could ignore the two, leaving the police and medics to clean up the mess once again.

Maybe not a moment that made for civic pride, but it was livable - in Chicagoan terms, ignorable, and the chaos wasn't always completely bad. Lake Shore Drive would soon be shut down, as cars came to a halt and people watched the show from their convertables or from the raised cement dividers on the road. Some of us would enjoy the yearly tradition of picnicking on the Drive, an activity that would normally be suicidal, but at that point was perfectly safe. When the show was over, one would watch well over a million people pour onto the streets all at once, the pedestrians taking the downtown away from the cars for about 20 minutes - pure theater, which you might see recorded in some of the photos and videos in this group. A little photoshop would not be a problem in these - those shots of a fallen pedestrian transfixed in horror as a parked vehicle "bears down" on him become all the more effective with a little motion blurring.















The post celebration exoduses would continue until Daley the Younger, a few months before leaving office, decided to split up the main fireworks display into three smaller, regional ones, with Rahm Emanuel going on to end the downtown display, citing budgetary constraints as an unconvincing excuse. The third brought in a lot of people from the suburbs, as one could easily see by noticing how packed the streets stayed with foot traffic, all of the way to Union Station and the Ogilvie transportation center (former CNW station); in Chicago, the real money is in the suburbs, in certain select areas, and those areas are served by the stations toward which people were streaming. Killing the celebration meant cutting off the business those people were bringing into a city filled with people much poorer than them, but the police were pleased, and the city of neighborhoods was, after all, also a city of unions. Still, "no more fourth of July" is a hard one to sell anywhere in America, and keep sold. Sooner or later, Emanuel will be gone and the fireworks will be back. Until then, the show in Evanston gives one a taste of the old mob scene, and that's close enough to being in Chicago, that I'll be happy to accept shots taken there into the pool.

Really, any of the inner suburbs will do.











A few simple rules, then ... all shots must be safe for work, and taken in Chicago and the more urban suburbs served by the El (Evanston, Oak Park, Berwyn, Cicero) on July 3 or 4. They can show fireworks, but they don't have to. Yes, shots taken at the taste of Chicago are welcome, as long as they were taken on those days. All work submitted must be your work, and must abide by the Flickr community guidelines. There can be no exceptions to that. Even when I don't agree with the rules, I do have to enforce them, I'm afraid.

Let's go to the group. You'll find a link back to the homepage for the group (which you're on at the moment) and to the ring, once you get there.