March 8, 2025: Downtown

I love downtown Chicago; it’s sad to see the current state. Downtown has never recovered from the COVID days; maybe 50%… which has lead to many business closing; the violence doesn’t help, but certainly isn’t only to blame. The financial district, where I have spent decades, is different; walking down State Street is different. It sucks… Back in the day though… downtown was bustling. Those streets were packed with people Monday through Friday. Let’s pick back up our feature and talk about some of those streets.

For me it starts with Monroe. Sure, State and Madison is the center of it all; this is where the numbering of streets/addresses heading north, south, east, and west begins. We’ll get there, but yeah, my time downtown back in 1994 started on Monroe Avenue. This is where my first job was located, well, my first “real job”. Yeah, I worked at the Boys Club; I bussed tables at an Italian restaurant in the hood, but it was on Monroe where I began my time at Harris Bank. I actually interviewed for this job on Monroe, a couple blocks east of the building I would be working at; not sure you can really call it an interview. My dad got me the job basically; it was an entry level job, part time on weekends… He fixed machines for the bank and told them he had a kid who needed a job; there were plenty of kids working on the weekend shift when I started about 31 years ago. But yeah, the interview… took the el, the blue line at the time, more specifically the B train, downtown, and got off on the Monroe exit; walked two blocks, and I was there. I’ll never forget the looks I got when I walked into this high floor in this downtown bank with my purple shorts and oversized gold t-shirt; I asked if I should dress up… I didn’t, but it didn’t matter. Like I said, it was a part-time, entry level, weekend day shift job… who cares… haha. I wasn’t going to be making 6 figures or anything like that; I believe I started at minimum wage.

Getting off the blue line at Monroe was my normal commute to the job, until I got my car and started driving. I started at 7am on Saturday and Sunday…. an 18 year old kid, with a bunch of other college kids, expected to come to work at 7am every single weekend… It was probably the most fun I ever had at a job. I met so many cool people; we had so much damn fun. Yeah, half the time we were all hungover, but the camaraderie… that’s what got us through. We’d look out for each other, rotating little cat naps in our work area. There were about 100 of us working this shift on the 7th floor of this downtown office building. The building itself, I would always call it the ugliest in downtown Chicago; it wasn’t very tall either… 14 floors maybe a little taller. It had an exposed western side with absolutely nothing on it… until they started building up the skyscrapers around it. There was an empty parking lot across the street before then too. It was here, at 311 W. Monroe where I spent about 10 years of my life. I don’t regret a minute.