Plywood City

It is Monday, May 25, 2020. In the United States, it is Memorial Day, a holiday that honors fallen military personnel that also marks the unofficial beginning of summer. On this day, George Floyd is arrested in Minneapolis for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a grocery store. Already handcuffed and face down on the ground, one of the four police officers involved in the arrest, Derek Chauvin, suffocated George Floyd by pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. A few days later, forensics would confirm the act was a homicide, but the public did not need to wait for the forensic expert’s official confirmation. After a video of the murder was released, protests against the structural racism that continues to plague the US began in Minneapolis and quickly spread across the country, taking urgent meaning during a Trump administration that was exacerbating social and economic inequalities.

On the afternoon of Saturday, May 30, the protests that had begun across Chicago the night before took over the Loop. The demonstrators were met with a response reminiscent of the police deployment during the 1968 Chicago Democratic National Convention remembered for its violence against protesters. This time, more than a thousand people were arrested, cars burned, windows smashed, stores looted, curfews enforced, vehicle access to the city center blocked, and public transport service partially suspended in an area of about 10 square miles. The historic bascule bridges over the Chicago River that are so often photographed by tourists were lifted that afternoon and remained so—24 hours a day—for several days to prevent the flow of people from one area of the city to another. The river became a kind of moat on an urban scale, announced by the uninterrupted wail of safety sirens warning that the bridges were raised. Basically, the vital center of the entire city was accessible only by a single bridge, a previously unfathomable decision by then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot to limit the free movement of people in the city.

On Tuesday, June 2, between 4 and 5:30 p.m., I decided to ride my bike around the Loop before the daily curfew was enforced. I wanted to see the city in this unusual, eerie, and historic condition. What I found was a lifeless city with all its windows covered in plywood. All the panels were newly installed, immaculate, all the same color, and without any graffiti. Some businesses covered damage from the previous days, but most installations were preventive, in anticipation of a sustained uprising. There was absolutely no one on the street—not a person on the sidewalks, not a car on the road—a surreal sight for a weekday approaching what would typically be rush hour. It was something closer to a scene from Open Your Eyes or a movie set waiting for actors, than to a city of 2.7 million inhabitants. If seeing plywood-covered windows everywhere was strange, being able to ride—and stop—a bicycle anywhere on the road without encountering another person or vehicle was even more surreal.

I decided to get my phone out and photograph the façades of the buildings covered with plywood. One building after another, I photographed the wooden geometries that replicated the architecture they protected; buildings from all eras, historical and banal, connected by the same material. I knew this moment would be brief, before the panels would be covered with graffiti and people would return to the Loop after the restrictions ended and the bridges were lowered.

Where are we five years later? Police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter and sentenced to 22-and-a-half years in prison. Chicago did not re-elect its mayor, Lori Lightfoot, and Brandon Johnson is currently serving as the 57th mayor of Chicago. The Loop is still trying to recover from the effects of the pandemic and the shifting working, living, and shopping patterns. In January 2025, Donald Trump began his second presidency and is focused on undoing the reforms initiated in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

These historical moments and the responses that governments give to them make us reflect on the cities we build—with their successes and their failures—and for whom we build them. The plywood city of those days in early June 2020 was a visual representation of a structural condition that is still very present in the US. It is one we must continue to address.