There are, by the count of cartographers and real estate developers and politicians, God knows how many neighborhoods in Chicago. And no matter how sad and downtrodden, how happy and polished, people live and work in all of them.
Visual artist Tim Anderson lives and works in the West Town neighborhood, which is where he created what is perhaps the finest and most attractive map ever made of this city.
Originally a child of the north suburbs, he has toiled for decades in Chicago, his fascination with its history and its characters (both good and bad) informing much of his work. He got hooked on those who shaped and shared the city’s past when he was an eighth-grader in Wilmette.
“It was (Richard J.) Daley who really did it,” he says. “He was just so big, larger than real, that it really kicked in an interest, further fostered by one relative who was a Chicago businessman friendly with Mayor Anton Cermak and another who was a crime reporter.”
And so he has made hundreds of paintings, of mobsters and pols, ballplayers and builders. He recently came across a painting he completed 15 years ago, one of his most ambitious projects. It is a map of the city that he was asked to make at the request of Gary Comer, a wonderfully generous man who grew up poor in the Grand Crossing neighborhood, made it big by founding Lands’ End and spent much of his life giving his money away.
When Comer died in 2006, his friend Lois Weisberg, then the city’s cultural affairs commissioner, said: “There was nobody like Gary, and it wasn’t about money, about the numbers. His contributions to this city will be felt for generations.”
They will be felt through such institutions as the Comer Children’s Hospital at the University of Chicago, Gary Comer Youth Center in Grand Crossing and in countless other less-prominent places and ways. Comer and his wife, Francie, were generous, and she, along with the couple’s two children, Stephanie and Guy, continue the philanthropic ways through the Comer Family Foundation, which funds all manner of people and activities in the areas of education, culture, health care and the environment.
“Gary was a great man,” says Anderson.
The map was part of CITY 2000, an outlandishly ambitious Comer-funded project that began at the stroke of midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, with the intention — as the project’s manager, former Sun-Times photo editor Rich Cahan said then — of “creating a diary of Chicago, in pictures and words, that captures the everyday lives of Chicagoans; to tell the story of Chicago’s year.” It would end a year later, having employed hundreds of photographers. The project would eventually yield 500,000 photos, some of which wound up in a 2006 book, “City 2000.”
This adventure started one spring day in 1999, when Comer was driving along Michigan Avenue.
“I was looking at all these buildings, the construction work on the Millennium Park, and I started thinking, none of this is going to be here in 1,000 years; at the next millennium all of this will be gone,” he told me at the time. “Buildings are only built to last 100, 120 years. I thought we should have a record of the way the city looked.”
And a map, too, and so did Comer and Cahan approach Anderson.
“I jumped into it and loved every minute of the research that it took,” Anderson says. “The city of Chicago had long since abandoned the concept of neighborhoods in favor of the simpler form called ‘Community Areas’ that resulted in 76 different areas. I started doing research, at places such as City Hall, the Newberry Library, the Ryerson and Burnham libraries, and each and every other resource I could find.”
He made a large oil painting of what turned out to be 198 distinct and historical neighborhoods, and he was pleased. Comer and Cahan, too, though they did tell Anderson, “You are never going to please everyone.”
His map will please most. It is colorfully artful, containing all the familiar neighborhoods — Old Town, West Pullman, Pilsen, Gage Park, Edison Park — but also some surprises, such enclaves as Sleepy Hollow, The Villa, Epic, Vittum Park and others that even the most knowledgeable Chicagoan would have a hard time identifying.
“I met great people who helped me at every turn,” says Anderson. “There were a few maps out there available as posters, and I soon realized that they were full of mistakes and lazy judgment calls concerning borders and details.”
The map was a big hit. But over the years Anderson didn’t think much about his painting and actually lost track of the original. He recently discovered that it was part of the Richard J. Daley Special Collections in The University of Illinois at Chicago Library.
He went to see it and had it photographed professionally by Mark Ballogg. He then had it printed in a 22-by-28-inch format on sturdy stock, with a solid aqueous coating.
“I wanted something that would last,” he says.
His idea was to start selling them, but he had wound up — justifiably proud is he of the work — giving many away. “It was also a way of having people remember Gary Comer,” he says.
The map is available for $40 by contacting the artist (www.timandersonart.com) or at the Alley Gallery in Evanston (www.thealleygallery.com).
And there is another way that Gary Comer lives on. The CITY 2000 photos have long been available through UIC, and recently nearly 15,000 of those images have become even more accessible at the snazzy new Chicago Collections site (www.chicagocollections.org).
Long ago, when he was overseeing CITY 2000, Comer told me, “I see this entire project as a message to the future.”
Well, consider it delivered, a vibrant and exciting message and a gift.
“After Hours With Rick Kogan” airs 9-11 p.m. Sundays on WGN-AM 720.
rkogan@tribpub.com Twitter @rickkogan
