Haymarket Riot Pilgrimage

My traveling friend Ed has long been fascinated with the theory and practice of pilgrimage, something I really didn't appreciate until more recent years. I thought about pilgrimage last Friday not when I visited Old Patrick's Church, or stood before the maiden of the peat bog in Mr. Daley's nearly new pocket park. Interesting spots, certainly, but nothing special for pilgrims. Instead, it occurred to me at a secular pilgrimage site not far away.

A little further north along Des Plaines, just north of its intersection with Randolph, is the site 1886 Haymarket Riot, which is pilgrimage destination for anarchists, or at least black-flag sympathizers, even now. The concept of "pilgrimage" and "anarchism" might seem to exclude each other, but not at this particular spot.

How do I know this? In the spring of 2002, I had lunch at the hot dog stand about a block from the site. In those days, a weathered plaque fixed to the sidewalk was the only monument on site to the tumult of 1886. As I had lunch, I overheard conversation at the next table that had a distinct anti-globalization tone, spiced by anarchist sentiments. Not something you hear too often at Chicago hot dog stands. They were kids -- college kids, maybe even older high school students -- so it's entirely possible that their commitment to anarchism was neither deep nor lasting.

Be that as it may, they left before I did, and walked over to the plaque and spent a couple of minutes there, doing something, but I couldn't quite see what. By the time I finished my lunch, they were gone, and I walked over to the plaque and saw that the anarcho-kids had taken small white stones from a nearby vacant lot and used them to make a circle with an A in it, a symbol for anarchism, on the sidewalk next to the plaque. They probably would have scoffed that the notion that they'd completed an act of pilgrimage, but that's what they were doing.

In more recent years, the city has erected a statue to mark the site of the Haymarket Riot. By Chicago sculptor Mary Brogger, the work is supposed to evoke the speakers of May 4, 1886, and the wagon that the speakers stood on to promote their message of an eight-hour work day, before a bomb was tossed at the gathering and all hell broke loose.

I suspect that this graffito wasn't part of the original design:

This writing certainly wasn't done by the sculptor -- it was left by pilgrims:

If you look carefully at this side of the plinth, the City of Chicago seal on the plaque has been painted over by the circle-and-A anarchism symbol. More pilgrims at work: