Running Around Illinois: Manhattan

March 2, 2024

Manhattan Irish Fest Parade 5K

Manhattan (Will County)

Gun Time: 26:06.8

In 2006, my girl and I went on our first big trip together, to New York City. A lot of exciting things happened there, including our taking in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Manhattan.

It would be another 18 years before I was at another Irish-themed parade.

As it so happened, this one was also in Manhattan!

Manhattan is, in relative terms, something of a boomtown. Its population today is a little over 10,000, but as recently as 1990 the census results were 2,059. The sprawl of Chicagoland constantly creeps further and further out, and Manhattan is one of those places which used to just be a small town, but is now arguably an exurb. It’s not a perfect definition, but look at the Chicago metro area in Google Maps, and look where the connected pale color ends (that’s the outline of Manhattan at the bottom):

In an erstwhile small community like this which has undergone relatively recent sprawly growth, the effect can be a little weird. Houses can wind up being a little larger than average but also cheaper than average, and can transform a town where pretty much everything is in walking distance into something a little different.

In 2006, I was the Green Party’s representative on the board of COFOE (Coalition for Free and Open Elections), a fascinating little entity which in simplest terms consisted of one person from each of America’s largest third parties (Green, Libertarian, Constitution, Reform, Socialist), all led by a wonderful man named Richard Winger who had taken it upon himself to learn everything he could about ballot access laws across the country. We met once a year, and that year we were invited to meet at the law offices of Harry Kresky in Manhattan. The only question was which weekend we would meet, and I recommended the weekend that we ultimately chose.

There are a lot of other similarities to some of the now-they-are-exurbs in the far ring around Chicagoland. One thing is that several of them make lists of the “safest” communities in Illinois. This makes sense to me: these are smaller places which were tacitly rural, but still close to urban areas, and so on average they tended to be a bit more affluent than other smaller towns. Along similar lines, they also often present attractive destinations for parents looking to get away from “bad” schools.

Uh oh, he’s putting words in “quotes”, what’s he getting at?

So, you might be wondering at this point: Are these places… kind of… white? Well, yes. Yes, they are. Manhattan happens to come in at 97% white, and is a probable former sundown town. As recently as 1990, the census showed that Manhattan had zero African-American residents, which simply cannot happen by chance.

It so happens I have a little inside info on Manhattan, and what I hear about is a place where in recent decades people have been attracted by relative affordability, but where things have gotten just as expensive as everywhere else; and where some people may have been attracted by “safe” as something of a code word. And so while it’s true that crime is low, bullying - especially anti-LGBT bullying - is apparently a really big problem. When tradition and change collide - and especially when some of that tradition is rooted in reactionary thought - well, I think it can explain a lot of the problems we see in American political culture today.

My point here is not to trash this town, though, but rather to heed the wisdom I found in this quote on the website for the Manhattan Irish Fest:

Not knowing why things are as they are… this sounded like a familiar theme. Indeed, the quote on top of History and Social Justice website says:

I advocated for that particular weekend in March 2006 because there was something else I wanted to do in Manhattan that very weekend. To be sure, we did a lot in just a few days. We went to Chinatown, we went to a comedy show, we found an Italian restaurant with checkerboard tablecloths. But I had a concert in mind.

This was the 30th annual Manhattan Irish Fest. Most races I’ve participated in have been standalone events unto themselves. But here, the 5K is actually the head of the parade. This means that, technically, I was in the parade. This meant that shortly after beginning the race, there were suddenly a whole lot of people flanking the street, cheering us on. That was weird. (I am told that the parade has been a very big deal to the town for a long time, and I would argue this is some of the other side of the coin from above - a lot of what we are lacking in America today is a strong sense of community, but community was definitely on display this day. As were… some Blue Jackets?)

This also may have been the strangest race route I’ve been on. Remember, at its core, Manhattan is a small town, so unless the course just zig-zags all over the place, you can run out of town pretty quickly. So, we started by a church, ran a few blocks west, took a sharp left, and found ourselves running along a federal highway, U.S. 52. We followed the highway completely out of town; at one point we were flanked by what I’m guessing was either a corn or soybean field. But then we turned left into a brand new not-filled-in subdivision, and then somehow emerging into a less-new-and-actually-filled-in subdivision, ending up by a school. All of this happened within the context of 3.12 miles, but it felt like this couldn’t possibly have been the case.

U.S. 52 is an especially odd federal highway, and, yes, I really am going on this particular digression right now. Follow U.S. 52 southeast past Manhattan, and you’ll wind up where I was a month earlier in Kankakee, indeed going right by Knack Brewing! It’s the southeasterliness which makes it so odd:

Pretty much nothing in the United States travels in this direction for this kind of duration. The termini of U.S. 52 are a place called Portal, North Dakota, and a road hugging the harbor in Charleston, South Carolina. North Dakota and South Carolina might possibly be the two most opposite states in the country.

U.S. 52 pulls the interesting trick of avoiding rather than connecting a lot of large cities. It does go through Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, and Charleston, but that all feels a bit like an accident. Within Illinois, the largest city it hits is Joliet, followed by Kankakee and Dixon. Do you know how difficult it is to draw a highway 215 miles across the length of Northern Illinois and have the third-largest city you service be Dixon?

And so Manhattan doesn’t quite feel like it’s on a road from here to there, but more so on a road from here to I’m not sure where.

Running back into Manhattan, my bearings were a little off, because the different subdivisions just don’t quite feel the same. And maybe there were mile markers along the course, but I don’t remember them. At around the 2 mile mark I think I had no idea how much was actually left.

I thought I was running relatively well, but I didn’t think I was doing anything special. One helpful thing was that the race followed the entire width of a street and then one lane of a federal highway for a while, so the sometimes cumbersome early going where you’re having to dodge people who got up near the front but who had no intention of running with any real pace wasn’t much of a factor. And as it so happened, I recognized a couple of people from the race a month earlier in Kankakee, leading me to conclude that although this was a larger group, this was a fairly serious bunch of runners on average.

It was also very nice to have a race begin at 11am on a pleasant mid-40s day. On days like that I’m often not sure how many layers I want to be wearing, and my trepidation was exacerbated by getting a long sleeve race shirt at 10:30, at a location about a mile away from the start of the race. I decided to do something unusual-for-me, which was to wear the long sleeve shirt with shorts, like some other people I saw. I had forgotten to bring my gloves with, but it turned out they weren’t needed after all.

Well, it all worked. I figured I was on about the same pace as I’d run in Kankakee - about 26:30 - but when I approached the finish line, I was very surprised to see a 25 on the clock, and crossed at a gun time of 26:06.8. Since the start and finish were in different places, my actual time was slightly better, and my app confirmed a true course. I had just missed breaking 26 minutes.

I’m 47, and I have not broken 26 minutes on a true course since I was 39.

In January, I had logged 34.25 miles on the treadmill. In February, I logged over 40 miles combined. In March, I’m trying to move toward doing more outdoor running, but the treadmill does afford certain advantages and I’m mulling over what kind of mix might be best. I’ll have more to say about some of this in the next installment, where maybe there’s a little less history and sociology to go around.

When the race was done, I had won a medal (third in age group), and was also given tickets to the post-parade beer tent. So I figured, okay, sure, and I wandered back over to the parade route, and it was a fairly normal small town parade with marching politicians and the like, but also for some reason there were dudes with a t-shirt cannon:

I found en route to the tent that there were a couple bars / restaurants set up for the day as well, and then the tent was huge and had no food in it, which, well, that tells you a whole lot about what the afternoon was probably like in Manhattan. I exchanged my tickets for a Smithwick’s, drank all of the water I had on hand along the way, and ambled my way back toward the Metra station so that I could head on home.

And so it all came to pass that on St. Patrick’s Day 2006, we were in Manhattan, at Webster Hall, for something we simply never thought we would ever see: the Silver Jews live in concert.

This is how it comes to pass that I celebrate the most Irish-American of holidays, by way of regaling you all with a tale of running a race in Manhattan, Illinois, by concluding with the greatest music video ever made: