Chicago Street Surfing

Zoom in on the silhouette of the dude with outstretched arms on the horizon. He's wearing inline skates and is about to ride the handrail from the Forest Glen Metra platform (across from my house on Balmoral), 45 degrees straight down onto the cement sidewalk 20 ft below. One minute later the 4:55 from Fox Lake to downtown Chicago screamed by with bells clanging and horns blaring and the whole crowd, mostly teens, flipped it off.

Hey, it's an organic way for the neighborhood kids to get together and have fun with the urban landscape. It's kind of like living across the road from Diamond Head in Honolulu except that the ground here is concrete and indigenous scrub brush instead of beautiful black sand and palms; and the kids are skating instead of surfing; and the temperature in January is 20 below instead of 80 and....never mind. Anyway, it was pretty cool to watch until the cops came and made everybody go somewhere else to possibly break their necks on private property. I'm pretty sure everyone flipped them off, too.

Geno Petro

photo by me and my iPhone