This Is Your Life On Andersonville

A small Devil’s Food chocolate cake lined with strawberries is cut up and distributed on napkins. The room is bare, stripped of all furniture except a thick rug in the center patterned with flowers and an overturned plastic basin in the corner. On top of the rug is a paper plate smeared with a chunk of brie beside a knife, surrounded by a loose circle of plastic wine glasses and paper cups filled with cheap Bourdeaux. A chorus of “Happy Birthday” is sung for the apartment’s new resident, Stephen Rettger, who has just turned 22, which means he’s three years away from being able to rent a car; then he’ll really be an adult.

There are trees, and they are plentiful; there are houses, and they are rustic; there are gays, and lo, they are friendly.

Sitting against the wall is Kerri Metcalf. She laughs, shaking her Mary Tyler Moore-style of flax-auburn hair once the song is finished. “Isn’t it weird being old for your grade?” She asks the room (her birthday was in the fall of last year). “You don’t feel that way until your friends turn it.”

Kerri works at Age Options, a nonprofit based in Oak Park that provides in-home care and nutrition to senior citizens. Every day, she hops on the El at the Bryn Mawr Red Line stop and takes it downtown to State & Lake, where she transfers to the Green Line to get off at the Oak Park stop. It takes around 90 minutes each way. Knowing her job would be so far away, taking an apartment on the idyllic North Side seems counterproductive.

“It was a neighborhood I was familiar with,” she explains. “My friends and I came down here a lot to go to Hopleaf and a couple other places, so uh, it was sort of close by enough to feel comfortable, but still in the city. It’s a fun neighborhood, young, liberal, all that good stuff, so…”

This is what happens when college ends and everyone leaves town. Leases end, friends move or marry or find work, library privileges are lost, e-mail accounts are shut down and hanging out at your frat house signifies an inability to graduate to the real world. The bubble pops. The bubble reforms. There is Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami, Toronto, Des Moines, San Diego, Houston, New Orleans, and Pittsburgh. In Chicago, there is Lincoln Park, Wicker Park, Hyde Park, Rogers Park, Wrigleyville, Lakeview, the Gold Coast, the Ukrainian Village, Little Italy, and any other neighborhood not yet brushed by gentrification and the college boom.

A short ride away from Evanston, there is Andersonville. There are trees, and they are plentiful; there are houses, and they are rustic; there are gays, and lo, they are friendly. There is Clark, populated with coffee shops and restaurants; there is Broadway, a stretch that never ends as the road gets wider and wider, filled with Korean bakeries and gas stations. There are old friends and new friends and sort-of friends at birthday parties and apartment parties and wine parties; there is Thursday night inside a warm apartment, insulated from the rain outside.

These Northwestern graduates are professional and plugged in, even at midnight.

In addition to Kerri, there are at least ten, maybe twenty or even thirty Northwestern graduates who live in Andersonville, who interact with each other often, meeting in apartments for wine parties or hanging out on weekends to watch TV. They are old friends and new friends, meeting each other free of the context of being in school, not talking about the classes they’re in or the parties they’ve been to, conversations perhaps guiding themselves along the kind of “Oh, did you know this person?” talk that springs up when the dialogue is lacking, but who else are you going to talk to?

Gracie Klock is Stephen’s roommate. When her lease ended in August, she moved to Andersonville after considering other neighborhoods. Tonight’s wine party, held in their apartment, brims with people she’s never met or doesn’t know very well. There are Northwestern students she never met during her years in school, and there’s someone’s Australian friend wearing a pink dress with big, done-up 80’s hair, who’s incessantly snapping photos. About half the people in the room have their Blackberries out, positioned on the floor next to them, a reminder that these Northwestern graduates are professional and plugged in, even at midnight.

“At Northwestern, some of your friends you’re friends with because you have something in common with them, like you took a class or they were friends with someone you knew,” Gracie says. “In Andersonville, we have one thing in common with each other, which is that we went to Northwestern and now we live in Andersonville. It might become different as we live there longer, but right now it’s a jumping off point.”

Inside Gracie and Stephen’s apartment, unfurnished and bare of any furniture, the jumping off leads to sequestered circles, people splitting to talk about their own issues and lives, topics like the still-relevant Bernie Madoff scandal, the evils of the prison system, or, more typically of recent college graduates, how great study abroad was.

There isn’t always a hot spot on Friday night, but there are plenty of antique stores.

Later, Stephen will mention “certain types of people you envision in certains neighborhoods,” going on to talk about Wicker Park alums and Lincoln park alums. Who’s our man in Lincoln Park? Late-to-early 30s, white, affluent, nascent alcoholic, big into sports, econ major, car owner. And what about our dude in Wicker Park? Early-to-late 20s, white but “open-minded,” almost middle class, probable drug user, liberal arts major, big into “the scene.”

Kerri takes the Red Line downtown to State & Lake, where she transfers to the Green Line to get off at the Oak Park stop. It takes 90 minutes each way.

Andersonville is a little tougher to pin down. The neighborhood is too close to working-class Hispanic and Asian populations to be trendy (except in an ironic, salt-of-the-earth way) and there are too many families out walking their dogs for it to be truly hip. The Andersonville person is more ambiguous, guided not by the appearance of any cultural hub or zeitgeist, but the desire for a place to live. There isn’t always a hot spot on Friday night, but there are plenty of antique stores.

He and his friends are “trying to continue the NU experience here,” but when they talk it’s not about college or other people they knew at NU (later that night, I will find out this is mostly not the case).

“I don’t go antique shopping,” Gracie explains, “but I like that there are antique stores in my neighborhood. On Clark Street there’s a Starbucks and an Einstein’s, but everything else is something there’s only one of.” The wine everyone is drinking was bought at a local wine store called In Fine Spirits; the brie was purchased at Jewel.

Ryan Erickson meets me at his apartment and we walk to a nearby coffee shop called Taste of Heaven. The weather is warm, but he wears a button-up shirt that accentuates his patrician chin, the kind that would pass him off as a successful businessman or East Coast prepster, if he didn’t volunteer at the Center on Halsted, a community center for Chicago’s LGBT population. He’s the Community Relations and Outreach Manager, which means he spends time making sure the neighborhood coexists with the center. He mentions uneasy situations where kids who come to the center looking for help are seen causing trouble in the neighborhood, and how difficult it can be to patch up such relations.

His reasons for moving to Andersonville are similar to everyone else’s. A diverse culture, a mix of laid-back and active night life, lots of things to explore, cheap rent, and an ideal location.

He pays for my coffee when we meet, brushing off my open wallet. When we sit, he speaks with authority—referring to a “Northwestern diaspora,” he says he was “surprised to see how many people ended up here.” By his count, there are twenty people in the little NU circle that’s developed here, and he knows them all. “I started branching out when I was a junior,” he says, “but everyone goes to the same places: The Loop, Mag Mile, and so on. Most people don’t go outside the obvious circles.”

His reasons for moving to Andersonville are similar to everyone else’s. A diverse culture, a mix of laid-back and active night life, lots of things to explore, cheap rent, and an ideal location. He says that he and his friends are “trying to continue the NU experience here,” but when they talk it’s not about college or other people they knew at NU (later that night, I will find out this is mostly not the case). The neighborhood offers lots of variety, he says, and encourages you to be less selective in your day-to-day life. Unaccustomed to the same routines and surroundings, you must find new ones.

You work, you get home, you see your friends, you drink (but not too much), and wake up the next morning at 8 A.M. expecting the same.

Later on, as I notice Ryan prowling around the apartment, wine glass in hand, eventually resting on the windowsill while everyone sits on the floor, I’ll notice that he maybe sees himself as the group’s elder statesman. (Before he invites me to the event, he says, “Not to say it’s my tradition, but I started it.”) These little gatherings and others like them are the only opportunities to assert such dominance; everyone has a job, no one has free time, and if they meet it’s on the weekend or right before it. Your reckless Williamsburg (or Wicker Park) social lives don’t happen here; there’s responsibility, quiet cafes with verandas, families that will (probably) call the cops on you if you’re raging at 3 A.M., if only because the kids have to go to school in the morning. That might feel like Evanston, but away from the pressures of being social in college, it begins to feel like life. You work, you get home, you see your friends, you drink (but not too much), and wake up the next morning at 8 A.M. expecting the same.

Does it sound boring, an ideal college dream deferred into residential ennui, placated by small rewards and the comforts of familiarity? Not at all. The scene in Andersonville is overwhelmingly pleasant, a cross between your wild youth and your suburban adulthood, full of promise if not constant excitement.

I pictured the people sitting in the apartment in their 40s, doing the same thing, drinking wine and making small talk, but they wouldn’t be old for a very long time. Now, they were young, sitting on the floor, shoes kicked off, stretching the possibilities of conversation with unfamiliar faces, discussing religion, education, God, economics, Paris, and whatever else. It’s a world very close to where current Northwestern students are, actual adulthood and responsibilities, jobs to get to in the morning, bills to pay, friends to call because you’re not just going to run into them in the street.

Kerri is the first to leave, because she has to wake up early in the morning. Soon after, I sense my observations running low and bid everyone a farewell. I imagine the night goes on for hours, even when the wine has run out. I board a Red Line train and head north.

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