A View From the Bridge
“Look at this,” Joe says disgustedly, catching a pair of underpants with the toe of his hiking boot. “We didn’t have shit like this. We had it bagged up.”
Joe and his camp mate–a bearded 59-year-old street veteran who goes by the handle “Old Dude”–first saw trouble coming last fall, when the police gave Old Dude a ticket for rooting through garbage cans. Old Dude earned what little money he needed by cruising the alleys of Lincoln Park, collecting aluminum cans and copper discards from the homes of the prosperous. Selling the haul to scrap dealers brought in about $20 a week, “enough to do my laundry, buy soda pop once in a while, buy something to cook.”
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Lincoln Park has a reputation as the best scavenging site in town, so Old Dude was able to furnish the campsite with the leavings of the leisure class. “There was all kinds of stuff that we needed,” he says. “Clothing, shoes, a mirror, pots and pans, charcoal. People give you stuff too. I’ve gotten several bicycles.”
“It was a great spot,” Old Dude says enthusiastically. “Are you kidding? Best spot I ever had.”
Joe grew up on the southwest side and attended city colleges after high school, intending to major in sociology. In 1986 he moved to Boulder, hoping to study at Colorado University. That never panned out, and he ended up drifting down to the Gulf Coast. Eventually he found his way back to Chicago, and for the past seven years he’s shuttled between homeless shelters, flophouses, YMCAs, and the outdoors.
Joe saw the first signs of the crackdown in early February. “About a month ago, there were quite a few homeless people sleeping on the Blue Line,” he says. “Just a couple weeks later, there were none. They’d changed to the Red Line, and you’d see homeless there. Now there aren’t any on the Red Line.”
