Relatively few people venture into Lower Wacker. If they come at all it’s fleetingly in their cars, zipping through to bypass the traffic above in Chicago’s downtown Loop. There isn’t much here to warrant a visit otherwise, just a subterranean warren of roads, alleys, sewers and pillars, all bathed in a dull, orange light. There are no stores, restaurants, trees or grass—just concrete and the dull shoom-shoom-shoom of cars and trucks going by. It’s austere and bleak.
The Windy City is cold and inhospitable for many months of the year, which is when Lower Wacker becomes appealing to a certain segment of the population. This frigid weekend in early April is a case in point. With temperatures hovering in the low thirties, several hundred beleaguered individuals have fled here to seek protection from the elements above. The tunnels and pillars block the worst of the wind, rain and sleet, making a bone-chilling night slightly more survivable for Chicago’s homeless population.
Lower Wacker also serves another purpose when it comes to these marginalized people—it hides them from sight. Like the shunned, subterranean Morlocks in X-Men comics (themselves an homage to H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine), people are effectively invisible here, freeing more fortunate Chicagoans and tourists alike from having to confront the societal issue. For the people who run the city, it’s a unique asset that other municipalities, struggling with the negative optics of their own respective homeless problems, are quietly envious of. But to anyone with a social conscience, it’s a postmodern dystopia where the have-nots are literally living beneath the haves.
It’s an unfortunate side effect of a civil engineering marvel that was initially built out of necessity. For much of the nineteenth century, the city’s roads were prone to flooding from the Chicago River and Lake Michigan. Officials decided to fix the problem by raising the street and building levels in the downtown Loop by several feet, which created enough space to install a proper sewer and drainage system. The Illinois Center development in the eastern section of downtown expanded the plan in the early twentieth century. Michigan Avenue, running through the heart of the city, was then constructed with three levels. The surface section was intended to accommodate pedestrians and local traffic while the two levels underneath were reserved for commercial vehicles. A number of other streets in the area adopted the same strategy. Wacker Drive, running east-west along the river, became the longest and last to be completed, in 1926. The mega-project, which now spans many miles beneath Chicago and is colloquially known as Lower Wacker, has helped to control congestion downtown ever since by quietly serving as a pressure release valve for vehicular traffic.
The development has resulted in some unexpected by-products. Lower Lower Wacker, the name by which the remote and largely forgotten third sublevel is known, has in recent years become a hot spot for illegal drag racing. Police have been playing an ongoing game of whack-a-mole with teenaged gearheads, who attract weekend crowds with their Fast & Furious–style drag races.1 The phenomenon led the producers of The Dark Knight to select the tunnels as the setting for one of the 2008 movie’s key chase scenes. Director Christopher Nolan found the sublevels’ bleakness irresistible: “It was such a perfectly natural place to capture the darkness we wanted for those mind-blowing, fast-action sequences,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times.2
Film shoots aside, Lower Wacker’s main by-product is homeless camps. During the Great Depression, thousands of unemployed men moved into the recently completed sublevels, which they dubbed the “Hoover Hotel” after President Herbert Hoover, who they blamed for their poverty.3 Over the intervening decades, city officials have alternately tolerated or cracked down on the camps, at times erecting fences to prevent homeless people from entering the tunnels or sending police to evict them after the fact. The dilemma persists today, as inhabitants don’t have anywhere else to go. If they are blocked or evicted, they inevitably end up on the streets above. And the situation is getting worse.
Official government statistics peg the number of homeless people in the city at about six thousand, but the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless believes it to be much higher. When individuals living with friends and family are counted, the number easily exceeds a hundred thousand.4 About nineteen thousand of those are students who have registered in schools to receive social services. Nearly half the people on the street or in the tunnels are between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four. Families make up nearly half of the total homeless population and represent the fastest-growing segment.
Mental health issues, addiction and abuse at home are all contributors, but the overriding factor is the skyrocketing cost of living. Rents are shooting up in many urban centers. In Chicago, they ballooned more than 60 per cent between 2000 and 2015. More than half the renters in the city are devoting 30 per cent or more of their income to housing, a portion the federal government considers unaffordable.5 Wages, meanwhile, are not growing at anywhere near the same pace. Paul Hamann, president and chief executive of the Night Ministry, a local homeless outreach group, says it’s a humanitarian crisis in the making. “We have so many individuals who are living on the edge,” he says. “They are literally one paycheck away from being homeless.”6 It’s a seemingly hopeless situation crying out for a solution—for help from any quarter.
On this cold April morning, a group of fourteen real-life superheroes are determined to deliver at least a little bit of that much-needed help. Assembled from around the Midwest and farther afield, the colorful assemblage is meeting at Millennium Park for an event known as Chicago Hope, an annual spring tradition in which real-life superheroes hand out sleeping bags, blankets and other essentials to homeless people. It’s a big, costume-clad charity mission.
Night Vision is unmistakable in his neon-green spandex suit, a large eyeball logo emblazoned on his chest. He’s philosophical in explaining his chosen persona: “I want to shine a light on what goes on.” West Devil, with his bright-red hair, black-and-red tunic and domino mask, is no less conspicuous. Civil Defender is dressed in black-and-white motorcycle leathers, with goggles and an engineer’s hard hat. Frost is also sporting a motorcycle jacket, black and blue, and a fearsome mask reminiscent of Spawn, the demonic comic-book superhero. He raps his knuckles on his chest to indicate the ballistic armor underneath. All four of these real-life superheroes are from the Chicago area.7
Samael is from Iowa City, a four-hour drive away. He wears a black leather jacket with red-and-blue accents and a chain bandolier across his chest. A blue-and-red skull adorns his mask, making him look like a cross between Ghost Rider, another demonic comic-book hero, and a member of Slipknot, the theatrical heavy metal band that also hails from Iowa. He says he’s a fan.
Patchwork, from Wisconsin, is draped in a costume that looks like rags sewn together. “I get ‘Scarecrow’ a lot,” he says, referring to the Batman villain. Reverb, who actually resembles Batman in his black outfit and cape, is from Lansing, Michigan. Nyghtingale, from the Xtreme Justice League, has made the trip from San Diego to take part in the mission and to attend her son’s graduation from the nearby Navy boot camp.
Citizen Tiger, a former paratrooper, has driven in from Huntington, Indiana, three hours away. He wears two tiger masks—one a tight-fitting Mexican luchador mask that covers the top of his face, the second a full-faced Black Panther mask that he’s painted orange, white and black. “Someone was still able to recognize me with just the one, so I’m not taking any chances,” he says. Canadian Justice, who wears a camouflage balaclava and wields a heavy wooden walking stick, has taken the bus in from Windsor, Canada.
Geist and RazorHawk are veritable royalty among the assemblage by virtue of their seniority. With more than two decades of real-life superhero activity between them, they are respected veterans of the community. RazorHawk is used to the cold. The frigid winters in his hometown of Minneapolis have informed his costume design—he’s wearing several layers, with his trademark orange-and-yellow vest on top. Geist, also from Minnesota, sports a green leather trench coat, cowboy hat and armored gauntlets. Sunglasses and a bandana disguise his identity.
Crusader Prime and Wraith, the brothers who organized this event, are the last to arrive. They’ve driven in from northwestern Indiana, about an hour away, and have just parked a rented U-Haul truck containing the cargo that the group will give away. Crusader Prime is tall; red-and-white medieval crosses adorn his smock and mask. Wraith wears a long beige trench coat, the kind stereotypically associated with news reporters, along with ninja boots and a full green mask that covers his face.
Their truck contains a sizeable stash of goods: 250 blue tote bags and a hundred red sleeping bags in plastic wrappers. The tote bags each contain an assortment of toiletries, socks, granola bars and bottles of water. Most of the goods are donations from Crusader Prime’s work colleagues—the forty-nine-year-old is a manager at an undisclosed health care provider in Indiana. Many of his colleagues know about his alter ego, which he protectively hides from journalists like me. The socks, he explains, are from Bombas, a manufacturer in New York that supports the real-life superheroes’ charity missions. “Socks are the number one item requested by homeless people,” Crusader Prime says. “They constantly need them because they’re getting wet or worn out.” The sleeping bags are from Warm Wishes, a charity organization in Bartlett, an hour west of Chicago. The truck itself has been paid for by Impact and Nyght, two real-life superheroes who weren’t able to attend in person. Crusader Prime is kicking himself because he learned, belatedly, that U-Haul offers free rentals for charity events.
Many of the real-life superheroes know each other, either from online conversations or previous group missions. They exchange hugs and pleasantries by the Cloud Gate, otherwise known as Chicago’s big bean sculpture, and get down to business. They head north toward East Randolph Street, then descend a flight of stairs into Lower Wacker, where the truck is parked. West Devil climbs into the back and tosses sleeping bags to the others. Citizen Tiger ties a seemingly impossible number of them to his rucksack. Patchwork stuffs half a dozen into a shopping cart. Everyone else tucks one under each arm, then grabs as many blue bags as they can carry in each hand. The brothers lock the truck and the team heads into the bowels of the city.
They don’t make it very far before encountering an encampment. Situated away from the sublevel’s main arteries and stretching a half-mile into the darkness, the alleyway is filled with people. Sleeping bags, blankets, tents and garbage bags containing possessions line the road, each delineating someone’s personal, claimed space. Several dozen people have made this area their base. It’s quiet, just before noon. Some of the temporary residents are sleeping. The superheroes file down the line quietly, solemnly handing blue bags to the few individuals who are awake, carefully placing goods on spots that otherwise look occupied. The smell of urine and rotting trash hangs in the air like an unmoving cloud. One man, roused from sleep, cheerfully greets Frost. “Thanks man, that’s a sweet sleeping bag!” he says.
The group moves on, arriving at a busy intersection. Patchwork glimpses a blanket and garbage bag hidden mostly out of sight behind a pillar on the opposite corner, a sign that someone is probably calling that spot home. Some homeless people congregate together for social and safety reasons, he explains, but others prefer to be by themselves. He grabs a sleeping bag from his cart and dashes across the intersection. A few seconds later, his drop-off completed, he rejoins the group.
A similar situation presents itself a couple minutes later. A lone sleeping bag rests on top of a grate, against a pillar on a traffic island in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. Cars rush by, the dull shooming noise providing a constant drone of white noise. Someone is bundled up, sleeping, though their face is hidden from view. A road sign reading End Detour stands a foot away. Patchwork drops off another tote bag.
The team continues on. Wraith points out a bright-yellow notice affixed to one of the concrete pillars, informing of “off-street cleaning” scheduled to take place in a week. “It’s like an eviction notice,” he says. Citizen Tiger notices a hypodermic needle on the ground and warns his teammates to watch where they’re stepping.
Nyghtingale is becoming despondent. She explains that the homeless people she encounters in San Diego are generally more upbeat. “We have this guy who always plays his trumpet for us. They’ll come up and give us hugs, they’re always super excited to see us,” she says. Here, the mood is bleak. “They’re curled up in little balls and just trying to fight to stay warm. That sleeping bag could absolutely mean the difference between life and death.”
Several respites break up the gravity of the day, like the cigarette break that a few of the heroes now stop for. Samael shocks Citizen Tiger by removing his mask to reveal that he’s Asian underneath. “He thought I was going to be some Irish dude!” Samael laughs. It’s a needed moment of levity before the mission resumes.
The group continues and comes across a man and woman bundled up together. They’re leaning against a wall, sheltering under the adjacent highway on-ramp. They’re both white—a rarity among Lower Wacker’s predominantly African-American population. “What the hell is going on here?” the man snarls. Wraith offers him a tote bag, but he waves it off. “I got pretty much everything I need,” he barks defensively.
Geist, the veteran, steps forward and explains that he and his teammates are dressed in costumes because they want to attract public attention to homelessness. He also tells him that they don’t take themselves too seriously and that they’re hoping to bring some mirth to the people they’re trying to help. The man warms to the explanation; his hostility shifts to bemusement. He introduces himself as Tony and his partner as Deanna. He chats with Geist for a few minutes, then shakes his hand. “I appreciate you, cowboy!” he says.
A few minutes later, the real-life superheroes come across another line of tents and sleeping bags, denoting several dozen more inhabitants. Citizen Tiger hands a tote bag to a man just rising from sleep. The man nervously smiles as he reaches for it, a sublime moment that captures the bizarreness of the day. An observer passing by might have difficulty making sense of the scene, where a middle-class white man dressed in a tiger costume is handing socks and toothbrushes to an impoverished African-American man living in the bowels of a frozen city. The recipient’s sheepish laugh is a suitable reaction. As Tony put it a few minutes earlier: What the hell is going on here?
Chicago’s homeless situation is not unique in the United States, nor is it even particularly bad when compared to other American cities. The Night Ministry pegs Chicago in the sixtieth percentile when it comes to homelessness, which jibes with official statistics; the city and state of Illinois don’t even make the federal government’s top ten. In absolute numbers of people on the street, New York City leads the way with more than seventy-six thousand, followed by Los Angeles with fifty-five thousand. When measured by homeless rate per ten thousand residents, Washington, DC, is first, followed by Boston and New York.8
Several cities have resorted to unusual measures to cope. San Diego, for one, erected giant tents downtown in 2017 to act as temporary housing for its nine thousand plus homeless denizens. That was in response to an outbreak of Hepatitis A on the streets, which led to twenty reported deaths and nearly four hundred hospitalizations. City workers sprayed the streets with bleach in an effort to contain the epidemic.9 Hawaii, which ranks first as a state in homelessness per ten thousand residents, built similar temporary shelters after declaring a state of emergency in 2015. The state saw a 23 per cent increase in its unsheltered homeless population between 2014 and 2015, and a 46 per cent rise in the number of unsheltered families. As is the case elsewhere, the skyrocketing cost of living is the main culprit.10
The US compares favorably to other developed countries in terms of per-capita homeless rates—only about 0.18 per cent of the total population, compared to 0.94 per cent in New Zealand, the leader. But those figures are distorted by overall population sizes. In absolute numbers, the US dwarfs its peers with more than half a million people living on the streets. The next closest country, Germany, has 330 thousand. New Zealand has forty-one thousand.11
Going hand in hand with out-of-control cost of living is inequality, another measure in which the US fares poorly. The US is paradoxically the richest country in the world, but also the most unequal, according to financial services provider Allianz. The country scores eighty in the Gini coefficient—which uses zero to indicate perfect equality and one hundred as full inequality—thanks to a gap between rich and poor that has been growing unabated since the seventies. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ranks the US as the fourth most unequal country among advanced economies, after Turkey, Mexico and Chile.12
Like vigilantism, homelessness obviously isn’t an exclusively American phenomenon. But there is something unique to American homelessness, which is rooted in similar origins. “We have the bootstraps approach in this country; it comes out of our pilgrim heritage,” says the Night Ministry’s Hamann. “Our ancestors came to this country, landed here in a boat and made something out of nothing. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and they made it. That is the pervasive American attitude. People feel that by the time you’re an adult, you should not be in that homeless situation, or you’ve chosen to be there. You haven’t been resilient enough to pull yourself up.” The prevailing view, he says, is that homelessness in America is seen either as a choice or as a personal failure.
The problem is sparking grassroots efforts such as Chicago Hope and similar charity missions by people who reject that bootstraps view. Growing homelessness is thus providing an opportunity for progressively minded individuals to partake in the real-life superhero community without having to engage in the crime prevention that has historically defined the movement. Many modern-day real-life superheroes either aren’t interested in the crime fighting side of things or simply prefer to steer clear of its potential dangers. Some also reject the status-quo protection associated with vigilantism, as well as the legacy of Phoenix Jones—who has derogatorily referred to charity-minded heroes as “real-life sandwich handlers.”13 If entrepreneurial crime prevention is to be considered conservative in nature, this newer form of real-life superheroism has emerged as the progressive wing of the party, so to speak.
The progressive aspect began to rise in earnest in 2007, with the first Superheroes Anonymous meetup in New York City. Attended by thirteen real-life superheroes, the event saw the arrival of organizer Chaim Lazaros (whom we briefly heard from in Chapter 4) onto the scene. Filling in as master of ceremonies after a last-minute cancellation, he came up with the nom de guerre Life, complete with a fedora-and-domino-mask disguise inspired by film noir–era heroes such as the Shadow and the Spirit. The group engaged in crime patrols together and shared techniques, but Lazaros quickly discovered it wasn’t for him. He found it difficult to catch crimes in progress, which made his patrols feel pointless. Along with fellow New York hero Dark Guardian, he would occasionally stumble upon drug dealers and chase them off, only to see them return shortly thereafter. “For all of the risk, the reward wasn’t all that great,” he says. “It’s not like I cleaned up the city—that’s it, no more crack in New York! I’m just not going to be as effective as a trained and armed police force in doing that.”14
Lazaros found greater fulfillment in spending time with the destitute. “I was walking around with this new set of eyes, looking at, who could I help? I started seeing homeless people, but more importantly, I started talking to them,” he says. He learned about their needs. “Food is usually not such a huge problem for the homeless. They can often get food. People would ask me a lot for socks, so I’d ask them, ‘What are the things you need?’” The answers he received informed his creation of “Life Packs,” which contain many of the same toiletries and essentials as the blue tote bags passed out at Chicago Hope. He also gained an understanding of the uniqueness of American homelessness by learning about how the people he encountered arrived at their respective situations. “In Denmark, you don’t become homeless because you had some medical thing,” he says. “In New York, I hear, ‘I got sick, I lost my job, I lost my health insurance, I couldn’t pay the rent, I got evicted, my only relative is a sister in Toledo and I haven’t spoken to her in twenty years, so I landed on the street.’ Some version of that is very common.” Anger swells in his voice as he continues: “It really bothered me to see so many people lacking the basic necessities in such a rich country. There are literally billionaires on the sidewalk passing homeless people with nothing. It’s severely unjust.”
Lazaros says he has been fortunate in life. He has a wife and child and has worked as a radio producer since 2006. He considers his family to be middle-class, but he’s cognizant of how his life could easily have turned out differently. He recalls a young man telling him about how he had been attending college, only to suffer an accident that required him to be taken to the hospital by helicopter. The experience ruined him financially and landed him on the streets. All that separated Lazaros from this unfortunate man was a random twist of fate. “If you don’t have insurance, you can get hit with a bill of fifteen thousand dollars for that ride—and they’ll collect it like credit-card debt or a gambling debt,” he says. “That’s the Jekyll-and-Hyde thing about America. You can become Bill Gates, but you can also become homeless from getting ill.”
Lazaros has tried engaging in charitable acts in regular street clothes, but he has found his costume confers several benefits. “A police officer, when he gets out of his bathrobe in the morning and puts on his uniform and straightens his tie in the mirror, he probably feels like he becomes something bigger and greater and stands for something,” he says. “Me becoming Life is probably more powerful than the priest or police officer. I’m becoming my higher self. That’s an extremely powerful feeling. ‘Life’ is certain parts of Chaim. It’s much more of my charitable side, my righteous side. It’s much less of my selfish side, my lazy side. I become a different version of myself.”
Wearing the costume also has practical effects, he says. Homeless people can easily recognize him and immediately know he isn’t part of a religious group or government agency. “They don’t question my motivation and they accept my help,” he says. “The idea of superheroes is so known and so powerful that it transcends language and culture. A superhero just helps people. They know, ‘He’s not going to ask me for money, he’s not going to bring me into a church. Okay, it’s a little weird, but I understand the deal.’ The deal is: I’m a superhero and this is for you.”
Lazaros has been one of the more forceful voices online and through the Superheroes Anonymous platform in advocating the charity side of the real-life superhero movement. His messaging has run counter to Phoenix Jones’s sandwich-handler put-down—that it’s okay for real-life superheroes to focus on homeless outreach and charity rather than crime patrols. “It’s quantitative,” he says. “On a given day I know I’ve helped fifty people. They have clean, dry feet now and they’re happy. I’m not trying to project or live out some unrealistic fantasy about vigilantism or anything like that.”
The origin of the Hope missions began with a visit by RazorHawk to the 2010 San Diego Comic-Con. Up until that point, RazorHawk—a former professional wrestler who got his start in the community by making costumes and gear for other real-life superheroes—had been focused on crime and safety patrols. Mr. Xtreme invited him to join the Xtreme Justice League in a charity handout following Comic-Con, and he was immediately struck by the scale of homelessness in the city. “We didn’t have that big of a homeless population on the street here at home [Minneapolis],” he says. “I had only seen pics. There’s something different when it’s in your face and you see people huddled in the doorways of abandoned businesses.”
The proverbial lightbulb turned on and he decided to organize Project Hope, a group outreach mission that would coincide with Comic-Con the following year. He spent the intervening months entreating real-life superheroes across the country and in Canada to come out, and to bring goods to pass out. The event was ultimately a big success by his estimation, with forty-six real-life superheroes congregating to distribute hundreds of food items, bottles of water and other basics. The Hope missions have become an annual institution in San Diego and have since expanded to a number of cities around the country, including Chicago, Portland and Seattle, as well as to London and Liverpool in England.
Besides the planned events, charity has also since become part of the standard operating procedure for many real-life superheroes, regardless of political leanings. “There are a lot of folks still doing crime/safety patrols and I think a lot of them carry supplies to help out the homeless so they have something to do while they patrol,” RazorHawk says.
The evolution is evident here at the Superhero Bakery, a pop-up shop set up at the entrance of the Pottery Barn factory outlet on Alameda Island. The cavernous store, situated in an unused Navy hangar just south of Oakland and across the bay from San Francisco, contains what seem like acres of chairs, tables and other assorted furniture. Just a few minutes’ walk away is the Sea, Air and Space Museum, housed in the World War II–era USS Hornet aircraft carrier, the main attraction of a former military base that is rapidly gentrifying into an offbeat shopping destination.
Manning the bakery’s counter are Rock N Roll and Night Bug, two of San Francisco’s best-known real-life superheroes. Neither is masked right now, but a picture of the couple in full costumed regalia sits next to the muffins, cupcakes and scones that they spent hours baking earlier this morning. Tired of watching the world and wishing someone would do something? asks a sign on the counter. The California Initiative is doing something.
The California Initiative is far removed from Phoenix Jones and the Rain City Superhero Movement in both temperament and activities, the pink-haired Rock N Roll explains. The team holds free self-defense seminars, performs used-needle pickups and conducts night-time crime patrols, though they only rarely get involved despite the fact that both she and Night Bug have been martial arts instructors since the nineties. Indeed, they often engage in “grey-man” patrols, the term real-life superheroes use for out-of-costume activities. “We’re not the ones who run in and try to kick someone’s ass,” Rock N Roll says. “We’ve been on patrol with people who have and they scare us. Mostly, we’re eyes and ears for the police. We hope to not do anything in a night. We don’t want to run into a crime in progress. If you want to go out and save the day, you’re hoping for someone to have their worst day ever just so you can be that hero. We don’t subscribe to that. We hope that every night is a quiet night.”
A portion of all the bakery’s sales goes to buying supplies for homeless people, which the duo and their teammates distribute. Rock N Roll and Night Bug are very serious about homelessness, as they know several people personally who have struggled to make ends meet. One of them is their close friend Krystal Marx, who has flown in for a weekend visit from her home in Burien, near Seattle. Marx heads up the Washington Initiative, an affiliate of the San Francisco group, under the alias Temper. Her husband, James, used to be known as Evocatus, or Phoenix Jones’s right-hand man in the Rain City Superhero Movement.
Marx’s mother had Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy, which meant that she made up illnesses for her daughter in order to get attention. The two were homeless while Marx was young for months-long stretches, couch surfing with different families they knew in Aberdeen. Eventually, child services removed her from the situation and sent her to live with her father in Bellevue, Washington. Marx hasn’t seen her mother since she was ten years old. “That instilled in me really early on that who you present yourself to be in public may not be who you really are,” she says. “Being homeless doesn’t mean that you’re dumb or lazy.”
Her family continues to struggle financially despite the fact that she was elected to Burien’s city council in 2017. The job pays $550 a month after taxes, she says. Her husband, meanwhile, is mainly a homemaker who takes care of their four kids. He’s still recovering from his tour of Iraq, where a mortar attack left him with a traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder. Both are familiar with how easy it is to become homeless in the US, and how close to the edge many families are. Superheroes, especially real-life ones, are an increasingly needed beacon of hope. “Reality sucks right now, at least for a lot of people in America,” she says. “This is an escape to a better time when we were kids, or into a world where maybe, just maybe, there’s a possibility that something will come along and save us from it.”
The Bay Coast Guardians, meanwhile, are a newer team of real-life superheroes in St. Petersburg, Florida. Formed in 2017, the group began with core members Impact, who works in environmental remediation; Jaguar, a physical trainer; Good Samaritan, who’s in film production; and Ikon, a systems engineer. All four are white, middle-class and progressive in their views. The team routinely patrols the outskirts of St. Pete’s bar district on weekends. Downtown is the polar opposite of San Diego’s Gaslamp District—it’s immaculately clean, spans just a few blocks and is heavily policed. Revelers are generally well behaved as a result, which means the town’s resident real-life superheroes choose to occupy themselves in other ways.
Bay Coast Guardian patrols instead consist mainly of handing out granola bars and water bottles to the homeless people scattered around the core. On the pleasantly warm summer evening I spend with them, the team members help a pair of men figure out what’s wrong with their car engine, give directions to a woman looking for a bar and pose for pictures with drunken merrymakers. St. Pete’s actually has a higher-than-normal crime rate as far as Florida is concerned, particularly in the gang-heavy south part of the city, but that isn’t the team’s scene. Since their mission is mainly charitable, no one feels the need to wear a ballistic vest. “Going into a bad area dressed like we are is asking to get shot,” Impact explains. Tending to St. Pete’s destitute, he adds, is a far better use of the team’s time. “You could consider homelessness a disease. It’s something that can happen to you whether or not you do everything right, and it’s hard to get out of. It’s the least charismatic public issue out there,” he says. “In the grand scheme of things, we’ve had next to no impact. Very little. But, I’m doing something. I don’t do a lot, but for those who I do it for, it is a lot.”
Ikon agrees. “People are so self-absorbed, they don’t understand what it’s like to give something that is so small to someone that has so much nothing,” he says. “To see that smile is just an amazing thing. And when you dress up in a costume, that brings them even more joy.”
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, supplies are dwindling. After five hours of trudging through Lower Wacker, Crusader Prime estimates his team has provided at least a hundred homeless people with useful goods, plus some immeasurable amount of amusement from seeing grown men and women in garish costumes. It’s late afternoon and he says it’s time to go topside, back into the sunlight and Chicago’s hustle and bustle; there might be homeless people around the downtown Loop who can use the last of the handout supplies. It’s also an opportunity for the group to accomplish the other part of their mission—spreading awareness of what they’re doing.
The superheroes file up a stairwell and emerge into the daylight near North State Street and West Wacker Drive. The second part of their plan nets results immediately. A pair of women in their twenties ask the real-life superheroes for photos as they wait for the traffic light to change. Someone leans out of the side of a passing car and yells, “Why are you dressed like that?” Similar reactions multiply as the team moves south through downtown. On each occasion, the heroes stop to chat with people about what they’re doing.
As Crusader Prime later explains, “A guy in jeans and a T-shirt walking down the street who hands a homeless guy a sandwich or a dollar, by the time he gets to the next corner, who’s going to remember that? If you have a squad of ten people dressed in superhero costumes doing the same thing, that may have an impact on somebody. They may remember and maybe they’ll do a good deed next.”
Many real-life superheroes believe that striving to inspire is as important as passing out supplies, if not more so—it gets to the core of what they’re truly fighting: apathy. It’s obvious in cities such as Chicago, where people have become inured to the sight of homelessness. Residents and visitors alike walk past needy individuals holding signs asking for help without giving them a second thought or without even acknowledging their existence. “A lot of people turn a blind eye to stuff like this,” Crusader Prime says. “When the weather is nice, there are people out on every corner and hundreds and thousands of people walk by them and… nothing. That’s kind of a sad feeling even if it’s not you who’s on the street, that you can treat other humans so poorly. So let’s make ourselves stand out so other people notice the problem.”
Despite the issue being self-evident, American apathy doesn’t necessarily show up in empirical measures. The US ranks highly in charitableness, according to the UK-based Charities Aid Foundation. The country ranked fifth on the organization’s 2017 World Giving Index—which measures dollars donated, strangers helped and hours volunteered—and second over a five-year span. Americans are also tops in the world when it comes to helping strangers.15 The two realities seem to be incongruent, but both can and do exist at the same time. Americans are charitable when it comes to helping those who need it; but the scope of that need may just be too large to handle.
None of the real-life superheroes taking part in Chicago Hope are under the illusion that their actions will change the larger systemic problems, but they want to help regardless. “We’re trying to put a patch on the world,” Geist says. “We can’t be bystanders. I can’t. I just can’t be that person and live with myself.”16 Crusader Prime echoes that sentiment. “We don’t take care of our own,” he says. “A lot of us are one catastrophic event away from being the people that we’re helping.”