Picture your route to work. Some of it could move more quickly, but in other places you intentionally stop to talk to friends, or pick up something to eat. Or it's not a destination but a point where you reflect on what's ahead.
For me that's the subway stop near my home. Not so much the subway itself—we share the tunnel with quite a few creatures but it's not like visiting the zoo. And not so much the entrance, where the stairway is getting patched checkerboard style with whatever tile's on hand, and when it rains you have to dodge the puddles.
Beyond the Blue Line entrance at Division is a small plaza, which is possibly even less notable. Milwaukee Avenue is the cross street, and in Chicago we love our diagonal intersections. North, Damen and Milwaukee is just up the street, the gateway to Bucktown, and people are all in a hurry to get somewhere and walking every which way, no matter what the traffic signals say. Here, where Division intersects Ashland just a bit short of Milwaukee, there's this triangle-shaped wedge of a plaza that floats in the intersection like a raft. People mostly avoid it, as if it would float away.
The station and its patchwork staircase are due for renovations, so I was describing this place to a Tribune reporter. It's not as welcoming an area as it should be, I said. There's a constant fight against pigeons. I went on at great length, but those 16 words are all that got in the paper. When talking to a reporter, always keep a sound bite handy. This isn't the one I would have chosen.
It's not fake news. The reporter started out the column calling it a gray pigeony place—if pigeony is a word, it's unknown to Google spell check—and the pigeons helped out by posing for the Tribune photographer. So this part of the story has the insistent coo of truth. But my point was to look beyond the subway station and give some love to what has long been called the Polish Triangle.
