All faces, coins, and questions have two sides, there is concave and convex, and what man isn't a Janushead? This being topology it holds good of all things: so also of cities with their inside and out. I was born well inside Chicago, four miles from the Lake. Public transportation being what it was—I might just as well say is, but in those days no poor man had a car—and since the only practical measure of distance from the Lake was distance from a beach, all residents of the Jewish West Side, around Roosevelt and Kedzie, were dry-docked. To see water, you had to stand long, sweaty streetcar rides (the red and buff streetcars, reeking of ozone, with their clanging bells and screeching wheels, the wire-mesh window guards and the air compressors going diga-diga-diga-diga at each stop, the dust, the confetti of transfer punches, mashed cigarette butts and soiled newspapers, hot rattan seats on the sunny side, green shades)—how long those rides were! You might have been living in the heart of some central land mass, for all the difference it made, your proximity to water. Herewith, a theory on the matter.

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