Reese’s Pieces

I FIRST SAW Michael Reese Hospital, or what remains of it, in the winter of 2025. A cold, sunny morning. I was buying a large, blue lamp off Facebook Marketplace from someone who lives in Prairie Shores, the series of lake-colored high-rises on King Drive in north Bronzeville, built in the 1950s and rehabbed by a new owner just a few years ago. Once I pulled into the parking lot, I realized I didn’t have signal on my phone. The Messenger app wouldn’t load. I tried sending a message to the lamp seller but had no way of knowing if it had been delivered, and so I sat in the parking lot, facing east (I could see Lake Michigan on my Google Maps screen, but not out the car window), and took in the view. In front of me was a chain-link fence, partially covered by tarp. Beyond were brittle fields of grass and an abandoned, airplane-winged, beige-brick building standing on otherwise vacant land. I didn’t know the building used to be part of Michael Reese Hospital, which closed in 2009, a decade before I moved to Chicago. Looking at it made me wonder why this institution-siz…