Hi there! My name is Joe. I'm practicing leading architecture tours because I'll be taking the Cook County Tour Guide test in a few weeks. Yes, that's why it's free – because I'm not licensed just yet. What's my dream? Well, hopefully once I get enough experience I will be hired one of the boat tours on the Chicago River … that's where the money is on the tour guide circuit.
At least this is what I was telling people.
Visiting a big city is always fun. You get a book that tells you all the cool places to go, or you surf the web for days and days to figure out what you're supposed to see in whichever city it is that you are visiting. That sounds like par for a trip to an unfamiliar city, right?
Wrong.
I'm not saying that tours like that aren't fun; I live in Chicago, and I still take the Chicago River architecture tour at least once a summer. It fills me up with useless knowledge about this great city, like how every bridge over the river has a different style of watch-house overlooking it, each designed for a particular decade of style, or how there's that building on Wacker Drive that allegedly had a speakeasy way up on the top floor during the prohibition.
But these tours are cookie-cutter. The bus and walking tours lead the sightseers to places that everybody is supposed to visit: the Sears Tower, the Hancock Tower, Michigan Avenue, the Water Tower. The boat tours are limited to the Chicago River.
What about the sights in Bucktown? Or Lincoln Park? Or Pilsen? Or any of the city's 50 wards? Most of the time, they're neglected.
I decided I was going to “host” a free architecture tour of Chicago. It took me three days, but I made an awesome Free Architecture Tour sign, and waited for a beautiful day. I was going to lead the tour in my kick-ass Jeep, which is actually a piece of crap, and drop the top so the “customers” could look up.
When I was on my way down to the spot I had chosen to recruit people, I was pretty pumped up. It was Friday, 75 degrees and sunny, and the tourists were crawling the streets like ants on a dropped lollypop.
I parked my carriage, stood on the corner with my sign and waited. And waited and waited and waited and waited. Nobody showed interest in the least. People were reading the sign, but always kept walking. I decided that I needed to be a little more aggressive, so I began tapping my sign – which is a move I learned in Vegas from the people who give out the “escort” cards – and yapping at passersby:
“Free tour. You interested? Wanna see all the sights in Chicago you've only heard about?”
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