Michael Workman

Hanging out next to the Coke machines at the Green line train's Clinton station stop, a guy with a shaved head and glasses watches as people saunter in and out of the clunking metal turnstiles. He's trying to talk in that typical Chicago pause-and-start way that anyone attempting to continue a conversation in proximity of a roaring El train knows very well. "All world cities worth their salt have a public transportation system," Jonathan Messinger asserts knowingly before launching into a discussion of stories where public transportation makes an appearance. Stuart Dybek's "Pet Milk" figures prominently (a story in which a boy spends time "people watching and necking with his girlfriend") as does John McNally's "Book of Ralph." Most of all, he loves stories that react to and are situated smack in the middle of urbanity.

A former philosophy student at Clark University, Messinger was delighted when, while watching "Spiderman 2," he realized that the filmmakers had superimposed a Chicago El train onto a fictional New York City landscape. "People were saying, `Hey man, that's the El!'" Messinger has long had a special relationship with the Chicago Transit Authority, beginning with "Along for the Ride," a column centered around public transportation that he wrote while working for the Pioneer Press newspaper, "Oak Leaves." Based loosely on Jon Hilkevitch's Tuesday Tribune column, "Getting Around," Messinger so fell in love with the culture surrounding public transportation that he decided to start his own publication about it.

Messinger launched ThisisGrand.com, a website where he started publishing CTA-centered based stories, photos, graffiti and more in June of this year. As a personal project, Messigner's romance with Chicago transit hearkens back to the year 2000 when he first moved to the city with a girlfriend from Boston. " [Public transportation] is the only time in modern life where you're together with a bunch of other people where there's no movie showing or band playing."

And a noticeable side-effect of the material published on Thisisgrand.com is how it represents the city's trains and buses (what Messigner calls "the unsung heroes of the CTA") as a site of social interaction. Stories include the story of a bicyclist who encountered an "Indian healer" waiting out her boyfriend's drunk. It's the sheer social diversity that intrigues Messinger, who recognizes the publication's focus on the community role played by public transportation. "There's a kind of incidental advocacy we're doing," he says. "I get worried when I read they're going to cut back to just rush hour for some lines. Charging an extra quarter, for instance, would keep them from going out of service." He pauses to reflect. "It's funny. I used to get paid to do this and now I'm going to these meetings for fun."

(2004-08-10)

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