Bizarre Chicago shopping: 6 reasons why walking through Block 37 feels like stepping into The Twilight Zone
Michael Juliano
Ooh, shopping.
Let’s unload all of the clichés about Block 37 in one sentence: Block 37 is a high-profile project in the middle of the Loop with a long, storied history full of legal and financial roadblocks that have seen major tenants pull out and a transit superstation scrapped. Oh right, and it’s actually a mall. From its quiet opening almost a year ago to its resurfacing lately in the context of an express train line to O’Hare and the outgoing mayor’s failed business initiatives, seemingly none of the news coverage of Block 37 has ever focused on what it’s actually like to shop there and how utterly bizarre of a place it is.
With about 15 stores open now, the mall is still very much a work in progress (the exposed concrete, plastic wrap and power tools in some corners of the building are a dead giveaway), and it’s about to get its most high-profile tenant so far with the opening of a high-tech interactive Disney Store this fall. But for now, walking through Block 37 is a surreal experience that feels pulled right out of The Twilight Zone for six big reasons.
There’s nothing but soft, liquid food.
Godiva Chocolatier aside, the only food in Block 37 is located on the bottom floor, the pedway level. For those zipping between the CTA Red and Blue Line stations, the selection of solid food is pretty limited. There’s an Au Bon Pain with plenty of empty tables, and mall-staple Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. But the rest of the options? Two smoothie places, a vitamin store, and a frozen custard shop that looks ready to open. The future is here and it has lived up to its promises of food in liquid and pill forms.
The escalators lead to nowhere.
The directory promises that there’s a spa and a new Lettuce Entertain You restaurant coming soon to the third floor, but there’s no way to actually see what’s going on up there. The second floor escalators are tantalizingly running, but roped off. The sign reads “upper levels will be opening soon,” although “soon” seems to be open to interpretation as these same signs were up last fall as well. The lights are on up there and there are a few quick glimpses of temporary walls, but it begins to feel like the escalators were purposely engineered to obscure any revealing details from view. What are they really hiding up there?
The hallways are alarmingly faceless.
An empty storefront window here or there and some “coming soon” temporary walls aren’t really uncommon sights in a mall. What make Block 37 so bizarre, though, are the unbroken strings of temporary walls with no signs of coming down any time soon. It becomes kind of disorienting when there aren’t any recognizable storefronts that you can use to navigate. On the second floor, all three of the stores (Puma, Zara, Anthropologie) are just continuations of shops on the ground floor. Otherwise, the rest of the level is lined with these neutral-looking, lifeless walls and their curious wooden doors. (Curiosity killer: Some peeks through the doors reveal the grey, empty guts of a high-rise building.)
There’s no one there.
There is a slow trickle of people coming through in the early afternoon, but during most times of the day the space is a borderline zombie movie. All of the lights are on, the piano music in the background is still audible, and the stack of arcing Big-Brother-like screens on each level is still advertising bits of the Billy Elliot soundtrack. The only other human presence is limited to the occasional shuffling of a security guard, construction worker, or someone looking for the public restrooms.
It feels like a clinic, the really unsettling kind.
Maybe the lack of foot traffic has something to do with it, but Block 37 is extremely clean. Other downtown high-end malls like North Bridge and Water Tower Place are neat and cushy too, but Block 37 feels thoroughly sterile in comparison. Add lots of white tiles, bright lights, restricted areas, and signs reminding you about video surveillance, and it starts feeling just a little bit like some kind of institution (or the Aperture Science Computer-Aided Enrichment Center from Portal).
It houses a portal made of soap.
There are many weird things about the Body Shop vending machine, most conspicuously that it’s a machine that dispenses scented soaps while a monitor in the upper corner loops some exotic-themed PR spin. But the most inexplicable feature is how there’s a slit of light that leaks out of the wall around the vending machine. You can actually see into the naked room behind the machine, and it’s like peering into another dimension.
