Long Live the Chicago Rat Hole
Even something that starts as irony can give us a sense of community.
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There’s a hole in the cement of a Chicago sidewalk. It is shaped like a rat. That’s about it.
Still, over the past few weeks, the Chicago Rat Hole—named Splatatouille in a vote by the residents—has evolved from a neighborhood quirk into an internet sensation. The story began on January 6, when the comedian Winslow Dumaine posted a photo of it on X (formerly Twitter). The photo now has more than 5 million views and has inspired hordes of people to travel across the city to visit the hole themselves, bringing offerings of coins, cheese, and liquor, and posting on social media about their voyage. Discourse abounds. Maybe it was really made by a squirrel, an animal more likely to fall from high up in a tree onto wet concrete. Perhaps the rat already had a name—some speculated it was previously known to locals as Chimley. This past Saturday, the fever around the hole hit its arguable peak when a wedding ceremony was officiated in front of it.
Although there may not be many concrete holes shaped like rats in this world, the Rat Hole is a cousin to many folk monuments all over—those eccentric, niche, local attractions that become icons. Some, like the Rat Hole, are pure happenstance: Take the daikon radish growing through concrete under an overpass in Osaka, Japan, for example, or the whalebone on the coast of Scotland that looks like a bird taking flight. Others, such as the Seattle Gum Wall, the D.C. Barbie Pond, and California’s Flintstone House, are man-made. These aren’t monuments made to commemorate something—none would have any deeper meaning were it not for a collective decision to pay attention to them. It is human devotion that exalts the absurd into something more than a glitch in the mundanity of the everyday.
“It’s a bit of serendipity that makes it fascinating and interesting,” Samir S. Patel, the editor in chief of the travel magazine Atlas Obscura, which documents offbeat attractions, told me. “What matters most is how people adopt and react to it.”
And jumping on a weird folk monument’s bandwagon is easier than ever. Although these things might have stayed local legend in the past, they can now escape beyond their corporeal location and into the global, digital town square. In this age, when even the most minute of urban myths and small-town gossip can be posted for the world to follow and comment on, everyone can potentially partake in anything that happens anywhere. The Rat Hole is primed for virality; the internet loves hyperbole, and a phrase such as “gay wedding at the chicago rat hole” can’t help but capture attention. Of course, that attention can potentially go too far—some of the Rat Hole’s neighbors are reportedly annoyed with visitors’ noise and mess.
Perhaps devotion to a rat hole or a radish, or making a pilgrimage to stick another piece of gum on a wall, is just satire. There has always been ironic fun in assigning wonder to the nonsensical. But even something that starts as irony can give you a sense of community and a shared sense of meaning. After local news reported that the Rat Hole was filled in with wet cement last week, subsequent videos showed people in the neighborhood banding together to restore the hole. “There’s a bit of a narrative arc to it; there’s a humbug and people who care enough to dig it out again,” Patel said.
It’s this touch of communal care, of reverence, that makes a folk monument more than just a joke or a thing to look at. Undertaking the pilgrimage and participating in the running bit for no other reason than love of the story can protect the idea that delight is all around us. So respect the neighbors, but, yes, travel to New York and rub Charging Bull’s bronze testicles for good luck. Travel to Gangneung, in South Korea, just to see an abandoned bus stop on the beach that was featured on the cover of a BTS album. Take a photo in front of that one pink wall in Los Angeles that became Instagram-famous. Throw a penny into the Rat Hole, and perhaps you will find a spark of connection to something greater than just a rat-shaped hole.