DISTANCE
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When it was completed in 1889, the Auditorium Building was the tallest building in Chicago.
It wasn’t the first building to be considered a skyscraper. That distinction usually goes to the Home Insurance Building, built only a few blocks from the Auditorium but five years earlier, sporting an ingenious iron skeleton that supported its unbelievable twelve stories. The Home Insurance Building was the first of its kind. It was also demolished in 1931, and today it’s marked only by a sober plaque in the lobby of its forty-five-story replacement.
The Auditorium, however, still stands. Right on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Ida B. Wells Drive. I drive past it when I’m not running late to work and can skip my Lower Wacker shortcut. It was one of the first Chicago buildings I learned about when, twenty years ago, I found my first Chicago home in a nearby college dorm. It’s a stoic toad of a building, wide and serious, even with that slender seven-story tower on its south side.
It’s still a lovely building and the theatre inside is even lovelier, but its surroundings have changed. When you approach from the East—the lake to your back and that first stretch of buildings along Michigan Avenue standing above you like an Antarctic ice wall—the Auditorium is very, and sometimes quite literally, overshadowed. There’s the giant zigged aquarium of the Roosevelt University building close behind; the showy but serious red box of the CNA Center next to that; the blue lit and blandly named Metropolitan Building repping the jazz age a few blocks down; then the Sears Tower, looming behind them all like a watchful chaperone.
I actually don’t know if anyone ever considered the Auditorium a skyscraper, but I do know that it is five stories taller and only five years older than the world’s so-called first skyscraper. And so, whenever I drive past it and notice its stately breadth and now very unimpressive height, I ask myself a question that I’ve sat with ever since I moved to Chicago: did the sky used to be closer?
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I grew up in rural Illinois, down a gravel road outside of a small town in the middle of a big empty county. Our road had some big dramatic hills, which were pretty special for that part of the state. They were thrilling to coast down on my bike in a way that makes me nervous to think about today.
My family had a farmhouse with no farm on the top of one of those hills. It was a house in a constant state of renovation, so much that the home I left after eighteen years resembled little of the place I first called home as a newborn. But (unlike the Auditorium) its surroundings were constant: a few acres of lawn that were always spotted with lively gardens and fruit trees and prairie; about an acre of wooded space that was dense enough that when you walked along its path, you were enclosed; and beyond that, farmland as far as you could see in every direction. To the West were a dozen or so melancholy cows, forever grazing. To the South and East was corn or clover. When it was corn, there would be a giant wall of green stalks around our property by late summer, like a hedge fence affording us some seasonal privacy. When it was clover, there would be cylindrical bales of hay in late summer, bales big and round enough that climbing on top of them was a satisfying childhood challenge.
I have an idyllic but unspecific memory of an August dusk, an orangey blear of a freshly set sun, silhouettes of cattle in the distance. I’m sitting on top of a hay bale with my sister, smelling the woody and strangely sweet tang of the straw, just looking out for miles in every direction, watching the twilight imbue a whole world with new deep shades and shadows, and having no notion of the moment’s uniqueness within the sensory scope of my life as I know it today.
Yes, the world of my childhood smelled differently than my world does now. It had a different quality of light, different sounds, different tempos. But it was also shaped differently than my world today.
The gravel road we lived on was part of a network that was set up in a rough grid. Each box of the grid was two and a half miles long and one mile wide. And so, as I biked and eventually drove around that grid, I learned to think of the world in terms of miles. It was about three miles into town, about twenty miles to school, thirty miles to the nearest thing you can call a city. And since you got everywhere by highway, each mile averaged about a minute. The math of travel was easy. And there were long straight stretches of open road between you and anywhere you wanted to go, stretches that gave you many opportunities to make a drive quicker or slower depending on the needs of the moment.
The gravel road we lived on was part of a network that was set up in a rough grid. Each box of the grid was two and a half miles long and one mile wide. And so, as I biked and eventually drove around that grid, I learned to think of the world in terms of miles. It was about three miles into town, about twenty miles to school, thirty miles to the nearest thing you can call a city. And since you got everywhere by highway, each mile averaged about a minute. The math of travel was easy. And there were long straight stretches of open road between you and anywhere you wanted to go, stretches that gave you many opportunities to make a drive quicker or slower depending on the needs of the moment.
Today, when my parents visit me in my dense Chicago residential neighborhood, they’ll sometimes ask me something like, “how many miles is it to work?” I have no idea. Mileage isn’t part of my equation. One mile south on Lake Shore Drive and one mile west on Lawrence Avenue are completely different values. The math of travel is complicated, an equation that weighs various routes and time sensitive-travel patterns. The same northward fifteen mile commute that I took to high school every day would, from my current Chicago apartment, feel closer to a day trip. The miles between you and something else—true distance—doesn’t mean much here, because, perhaps, there is too much variation, too much diversity, too much stuff in the way.
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You probably understand my question about the sky, but let me unwrap it anyway. My modern sky is a busy place full of things that give it scale: tall buildings, low flying traffic helicopters, jumbo jets descending towards O’hare, but also other jumbo jets flying over the midwest entirely, just tiny specks in the sky spraying behind them a vapor wake.
This is the lowest level of the atmosphere—the troposphere—which has a height of four to eleven miles, depending on where in the world you are. My Chicago troposphere goes from the top of Lake Michigan to about five miles up. This layer is where most weather happens and where most of the stuff we see in daylight happens (except for that high flying airplane at the peak of its flight; most commercial airlines cruise just above the troposphere, into the stratosphere).
That's the actual map of the near sky. And because I see how all these things are layered with each other and with each type of cloud and bird, I have internalized this map. I can feel that scale intuitively.
Ergo: in a world without jumbo jets, where a twelve story building was so crazily tall that the word you cooked up to describe it was “skyscraper,” and where, as a result, you didn’t really have an internal map of the sky, did the sky just seem closer? Did a cloud, be it fluffy or streaked or wispy or stormy, appear more nearby when there was nothing to really compare its scale to?
It's clear that your environment, your context, can alter your interpretation of distance. My childhood neighbor was a mile away and my best friend. It was easy to bike down the wide-open roller coaster of a gravel road to go see him. Now I have thousands of much closer neighbors that I've never seen in person and likely never will, and biking that same mile to the grocery store is a chore because it's actually ten long and loud and crowded blocks.
Does the sky follow the same phenomena? When it was just an abstract painting of blues and greys and whites did it feel, perhaps, only a half mile up rather than five? It's an impossible question to satisfyingly answer, but it's a satisfying question to ask.
I have a hope that the edge of the sky did seem closer. In a wide open world that was once so difficult to travel across, in a world where miles surely mattered, it feels a cozy comfort to imagine a sky that was near. It also makes those first ventures upward seem thrilling and dangerous, as if the heavens could be punctured by the slender tower of the Auditorium, as if the sky was actually something that our engineering and ambition could actually touch, let alone scrape.
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References:
"Auditorium Building." Chicago Architecture Center. https://www.architecture.org/learn/resources/buildings-of-chicago/building/auditorium-building/.
Accessed 3 July 2023.
"Layers of the Atmosphere." National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. https://www.noaa.gov/jetstream/atmosphere/layers-of-atmosphere.
Accessed 3 July 2023.
Taylor, JW. "Auditorium from Michigan Avenue." 1890. Photograph, Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Washington D.C. Library of
Congress. https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/il0091.photos.061142p/resource/. Accessed 3 July 2023.