SECRET CHICAGO

Reviewed by Steven H Silver

A transplant to Chicago, Jessica Mlinaric has clearly fallen in love with her adopted city and has sought out some of the places that May not make it into the standard tourism books for the city, although they may be well known to the people who live in the neighborhoods surrounding the locations. In some cases, they may be major historical sites, others may be significant landmarks for the people who pass them every day, and others may be unnoticed by those who drive over them every day.

Mlinaric identifies 90 sites throughout the city and suburbs, beginning with a plaque erected at a southside strip mall to commemorate Barack and Michelle Obama's first kiss and ending with the Oakland Museum of Contemporary Art, a small museum located less than two miles away. In between, she offers a tour that stretches from East Chicago, Indiana to Calumet City to Red Gate Woods in Lemont to Evanston. These sites include restaurants, churches, statues, cemeteries, and even potholes and alleyways. In pointing them out, Mlinaric offers not only a tour of Chicago's physical space, but also of the city's history.

Each entry spans two pages, offering a background of the location Mlinaric is showing off, a small sidebar that provides the address, cost, and a note about the location, and a fact about the venue that doesn't quite fit into Mlinaric's narrative. While this space doesn't allow Mlinaric to go into much depth on any of the sites, it does allow her to give a quick overview of the locations and explain why she believes they would be of interest to those seeking to delve deeper into Chicago's spaces. Her inclusion of the price is useful, and many of the places she writes about are free.

An appendix of references provides the depth that Mlinaric's brief articles lack. Mlinaric provides information about when she visited places, who she spoke to for information and websites which provided her with details, often too many to include in the book. These links provide the reader with a way to learn more about the destinations before visiting, or, for those who aren't not in Chicago, a way of touring Mlinaric's secret sites vicariously.

At times, Mlinaric makes sweeping statements, such as "even longtime residents can't locate the source of the brownie-like aroma" put out by Blommer's Chocolate Company, although the source of the smell, like that of the one-time site of Superior Coffee, was hardly a secret and well known, not just for their aromas, but also their locations. Other places she describes, like the Couch Mausoleum, are less secret, but possibly overlooked by the vast majority of Chicagoans despite standing reasonably prominently near the Chicago History Museum.

While the entries appear to be sorted in a random order, an appendix does organize the entries by location, dividing them into the Loop, the North Side, South Side, West Side, and Surrounding (suburbs), although this cataloging is not as helpful as it could be since Mlinaric uses the titles for the chapters in the appendix, such as "The Life Aquatic" rather than a more descriptive entire, such as "Silver Spray Shipwreck." Similarly, a map showing the general location of each of the destinations (or perhaps a map for each of the five regions) would give the reader a better sense of where the places were located in relation to each other and make planning excursions to visit Mlinaric's secret places that much easier.

Secret Chicago reveals a side of the city which isn't obvious. As Mlinaric says, these places won't be "listed in guidebooks next to the Art Institute or the Museum of Contemporary Art," but that doesn't mean that they should be overlooked, especially since many of them can be added onto visits to more famous attractions nearby. A visitor to the Art Institute (#62) could easily explore part of Chicago's pedway (#46) and grab a bite at the Chicago Athletic Association (#40) or Oasis Cafe (#150), although maps would make those relationships more obvious.

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