Uber View: President Obama in Chicago

Squad cars and TV crew trucks sat parked helter-skelter along Green, Randolph, and Fulton Streets in Chicago’s trendy Randolph Market district. Something was going on, but, I didn’t invest much thought about what because Chicago hosts famous people each day: Oprah, George Lucas or Michael Jordan, stars in town for movies and TV, concert or comedy club performers, sports stars, or a celebrity on a book tour.

Friday night, October 7, 2016 was unseasonably warm. The city was alive for Friday night entertainment and the north side, at least, was giddy with optimism about the Cubs beating the San Francisco Giants in the playoff run to end a 108-year World Series drought. My Uber rider was headed to a bar on Green Street in the Randolph Market district.

This neighborhood just west of downtown was, twenty years ago, filled with the strong scents and energy of meat distributors and some produce markets. At ungodly early hours, delivery trucks squeezed into every available blip of pavement while men in hard hats and white protective clothing carted fresh beef, ham, and, being Chicago, sausage in and out of century-old brick buildings. The city’s restaurants were supplied by the dozens of small firms lining these streets. This was your grandfather’s Chicago.

Enter Chorizo-stuffed dates, Michigan Berries and Brie Burgers, Shrimp Dejonghe, and The Girl and The Goat. Randolph Street now is a tree-lined boulevard we might rename “James Beard Way” or “Michelin Gourmand Boulevard.” While a few of the storied meat distributors remain in the area, most of the classic brick buildings host wealthy diners and hipster bar hoppers. Try Brazilian, sushi, funky non-Chicago style pizza, and a microbrewery ironically named for the lethal anarchist/ police Haymarket Riot that happened here in 1886. Au Cheval shows what a fine French chef can do to hamburger and even more amazing is how much Chicagoans will pay after waiting hours for foie gras and bologna. Add a distillery, a few residential loft conversions and plenty of media companies, and you see why this is fertile ground for Uber drivers. If Google had an office building in Chicago, which it does, it’d be in this neighborhood, which it is. Several of my Uber rides here have entailed picking up chefs with Continental accents.

I guided my Honda HR-V down narrow Green Street, snaking around numerous taxis and Ubers stopped in the traffic lane to let riders in or out. Crossing Randolph Street in a southerly direction, the rider’s bar was end of the block at Washington Street. I noticed policemen and TV cameramen aiming cameras about where my ride would end. As I eased in front of parked cars to let my rider out just in front of the stop sign, my eyes caught a busy scene in the outdoor dining area of Parlor Pizza. Parlor hugs the corner of Green and Washington. Every seat around every table was filled with people staring at a single black SUV at the curb.

Washington Street was closed, and a caravan of a dozen black SUVs were bumper-to-bumper, surrounded by Chicago Police vans and squads. As my rider exited, I remembered I’d heard a radio mention about President Obama returning to Chicago today to vote early in the 2016 Presidential Election. As I gazed at the media, Secret Service, and police presence right outside my car, I guessed the black SUV at the curb perhaps twenty feet from my car was the Obamas’. Given that everyone outside was staring at the SUV, I assumed the President was about to exit the vehicle.

Parlor is a Chicago original, but not for classic knee-deep “Chicago style” cheese in a cavernous black dish; Parlor is of the arugula-and-goat cheese pizza sort one expects in the modern Randolph Market neighborhood. Considering candidate Obama once got in trouble in the 2008 Iowa primary for talking about the high cost of arugula at Whole Foods, a high-end grocery chain then with no Iowa locations, Parlor Pizza made presidential sense.

18341872_1753455491347855_1906486519844385584_n — Where I was, just feet from Obama’s black SUV, where the parked bicycles are. Stop sign in front of Parlor Pizza at Green and Washington Streets, Chicago. (Picture taken later)

I considered hanging out at the stop sign until the President exited. I thought about taking my Samsung phone and switching from Uber Driver mode to Photo mode. Yet… parking at a stop sign is not legal and the area was teeming with cops. There probably were Secret Service sharp shooters who might take umbrage at a random Uber driver lifting a device and seeming to aim it at the leader of the free world. After a very long pause at the stop sign, the President still hadn’t appeared so I drove on.

I switched the Uber app off and searched for a parking spot, always tough on a Friday night in the Randolph Market area, presidential visit or not. I had to loop around a few blocks, but snared a spot on parallel Peoria Street a minute later. I grabbed my phone for pics and, fanboy style, veered toward Parlor. I ran into a couple of guys at the edge of a heavy police presence on Washington Street.

“Yeah, it’s Obama in there,” one said to me.

The President had left the black SUV before I grabbed a picture. I took one of the many Chicago Police motorcycles parked on Washington and started toward my car and back to Uber work.

A van with an Uber sticker slowed. A heavy-set Slavic man leaned out his open window and yelled, “Trump! Trump! Trump!” as he cruised by. Little did the world know, but, in a few weeks, Trump would surprise everyone by being on just enough ballots in just enough states to snare the Presidency, replacing Chicago’s Obama.