The city within us
Why clumsy development causes pain

Close your eyes. You still know exactly where your left foot is, and your right hand - and the rest of you - because you possess a mental map of your own body that enables you to feel connected to every part of yourself.

You carry around a mental map of your city too. It helps to find your way around, of course, but if you've lived here long enough, Chicago probably feels like an extension of your own body. You contain the city as much as the city contains you, and you feel the presence of the familiar landmarks in the same way you feel your elbows, your ears, and that little potbelly you keep trying to lose.

Wrigley Field: Beyond the Ivy, showing March 29-April 4 at the Gene Siskel Film Center, reminds us of how parts of the city live within us. The film rarely shows the action on the baseball diamond. Instead it focuses on life in and around the "friendly confines": the "ball hawks" on Waveland Avenue who grab home runs as they fly out of the park; the furtive ticket-scalpers looking for buyers on Clark Street; the ever-present Ronnie "Woo" Wickers, whose relentless war whoops for the Cubs cut through the roar of the largest crowds. Even if you've never been to Wrigley Field, these characters seem oddly familiar, like figments of your own imagination.

Steve Wolf, shown working obsessively on an incredibly lifelike model of Wrigley Field, is an overt symbol of what a landmark can do to us. The model, which took him months to build, eventually engulfed the living room of his home in Buffalo Grove, almost driving him to despair. In a way, we're all like Wolf; we end us taking the Sears Tower, the Hancock building, the Water Tower and host of other landmarks so deeply into our lives that they feel like a part of us - mental appendages.

Even little landmarks live within us - our favorite restaurants, the local Starbucks, a quaint bookstore. Some we barely notice, such as the handsome corner buildings constructed by the hundreds in the wake of the Chicago Fire of 1871. Theses buildings, scattered throughout the city, may be inconspicuous, but we still feel their presence, as comfortable and familiar as a pair of old walking shoes. Some preservationists, according to an article in this issue of CityTalk, want to preserve the corner buildings not only for their historical or architectural significance (which, admittedly, may be minimal), but because they promote pedestrian traffic and foster the energy and bustle that make a neighborhood feel alive. Theses corner building, they argue, help define Chicago neighborhoods, creating the city we know - the city we feel - and deserve to be protected from the wrecking ball for that reason alone. Yet these distinctive buildings keep getting knocked down and replaced by bland boxes dropped into the city like Monopoly pieces. Such thoughtless development alters our mental map, replacing a warm, lively spot with yet another cold, sterile drugstore or fast-food outlet surrounded by a parking lot.

When terrorists brought down the World Trade Center, many New Yorkers took that tragedy as an intensely personal assault. It wasn't just the death and destruction that disturbed them so; it was also the loss of one of the landmarks that defined the city and, to an extent, defined them. They experienced the collapse as a sort of amputation that ripped away vital piece of their mental map, leaving them with the emotional equivalent of phantom limb pain. One New Yorker made this association explicitly. "It's like looking down and not seeing your feet," he said about the alteration in the skyline.

The same thing would happen to Chicagoans if Wrigley Field or any other major landmark suddenly disappeared. Plans merely to remodel the ballpark have drawn vehement reactions from neighbors and fans. And justly so - every developer who clears a lot, or puts up a new structure, or alters an old one messes with our mental map. We feel the change, even if we can't quite identify what's different, and each change brings pleasure or pain, depending on how much intelligence and beauty it contains.

That's why developers should remember that every alteration of the urban landscape also alters our inner landscape - the one that makes the city feel like a vast extension of our own bodies.