Weird Ronald

I was in the city for part of the day, and happened to be in the River North district, which abuts the Loop proper to the north. It isn’t a gentrifying neighborhood; it’s already gentrified, but in a peculiar way that allows for a statue of a demented Ronald McDonald.

I went with Lilly to meet my old friend Geof Huth (dbqp.blogspot.com), whom I had not seen in person in nearly ten years—during, in fact, another period of unemployment in late 1995 and early 1996. We supped at Ed Debevic’s, a faux diner that serves decent food, intense milkshakes, and entertainment in the form of the wait staff dancing on one of the counters. Ed’s ought to be part of a chain, since it’s very chain-like in its approach, but oddly enough there’s only this one and another that opened very recently in the western suburbs. During lunchtime, the place is packed. At dinner, there were plenty of open tables.

Ed’s is one of a fair number of restaurants in River North, most of which have sprouted in the last decade or so (though Ed’s is older), along with condo towers, expensive art galleries, assorted boutiques, a handful of nightclubs and other businesses that feed on an affluent population—or tourists, who count as temporarily affluent in most cases.

The latest development in River North is a new McDonald’s. Not just any McDonald’s, but an enormous replica of a 1950s-style restaurant. It replaced the Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s on the same site, which was actually the second iteration of a Rock ’n’ Roll McDonald’s. The first, which I visited in the late ’80s, was a more or less an ordinary McDonald’s that had been stuffed with rock memorabilia of all sorts: the work, I think, of the owner himself, who took this idiosyncratic approach to driving traffic into his restaurant. Sometime in the mid-1990s, some fool (maybe the same guy) decided that it wasn’t good enough, so the place was renovated. It still had rock gewgaws, but it resembled a Hard Rock Café more than anything else—and it so happens that a real HRC is just across the street. I never went there again.

We walked over to see the new McDonald’s after we’d finished with Ed’s. The restaurant itself is two stories, but the overarching golden arches go up at least another story. It’s a commanding presence at that spot, especially since the rest of the half block is taken up with parking spaces. We didn’t go in, but the interior is very visible, and we took note of the many TV monitors inside, all showing McDonald’s products, and the escalator, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in a McDonald’s.

Just outside the entrance were about a half-dozen bronze figures, slightly larger than life, standing or sitting in various positions. The more you looked, the odder they seemed. One looked like a well-dressed retiree watering the lawn, compete with hose in hand. A couple sitting on a bench pointed excitedly toward something—away from McDonald’s, toward the Portillo’s Hot Dogs across the street, actually. Of course there was a Ronald McDonald, standing next to a child on a tricycle. His mouth was open almost in a scream, though I suppose that was supposed to represent McDonald’s Happiness. Still, not even the TV Ronald we all know ever shows that kind of ecstasy -- but maybe the sculptor was thinking more along the lines of Ecstasy. But that wasn’t his worst feature. Instead of irises in his eyes, he had a hollow spot, except for a small triangle right at the top of the iris-hole. All of the statues had this feature. Creepy, if you looked at it too long.