I pulled back onto Lake Shore Drive, whipping around the curves, ignoring the lake. I exited downtown and crossed the Loop to pick up the southbound Dan Ryan Expressway. I hate the Ryan, not just because of the traffic, although there isn’t an hour of the night or day when all fourteen lanes aren’t heavy with trucks and cars. I hate the way it was built, and everything about how it got built.

The road is dug deep into the earth. All you see as you drive are high concrete walls. They’re full of cracks with ragweed and crabgrass poking through. If you look up, you get a glimpse of scraggly trees and the occasional run-down tire warehouse or apartment building. Since money for the expressway came from the cronyism in the Democratic machine, they called it Dan Ryan, after the chairman of the Cook County Board who anted up the bucks for it in 1960.

When I left the Ryan at Seventy-first Street, I got an even more depressing look at reality, if that’s what it was. Too many of the houses in West Englewood leaned drunkenly away from their foundations. Too many of them had sheets or cardboard filling in for missing windowpanes, and most of the doors would give way to a brisk kick. Vacant lots, filled with urban flotsam and overgrown with weeds, were almost as common as the houses. The only food stores were the kind that prey on the urban poor, hiding a little high-priced, rotting produce behind the shelves of liquor and chips.

Few people were on the streets. I passed a woman clutching an overgrown toddler under one arm, a plastic shopping bag under the other. A couple of men perched on the curb at the corner of Ashland were passing a paper bag from hand to hand. A radio on the sidewalk behind them blared loudly enough to shake my Mustang while I waited for the light to change.

When I pulled up across the street from Fit for Your Hoof, I sat for a minute, trying to dispel the depression I’d let build in me during the drive. A man was sweeping the sidewalk, talking loudly to himself. When he realized I was watching the store, he shook his broom at me, yelling something unintelligible, before scooting backward, crab-like, into the shop. He almost collided with a woman carrying a scuffed pair of white nurse’s shoes by the heels who was leaving the shop, but he circled around her in the nick of time.