Chicago Rat Hole: A Site of Tourist Attraction and Kinship Trouble

Would you ever go out of your way to visit a hole in the ground? I’d guess not for anything less majestic than the Grand Canyon. In recent weeks, however, the Chicago Rat Hole has become a national sensation and popular detour. The hole—found on a sidewalk in Roscoe Village on the north side of Chicago—measures approx. 10x15cm but seemed until recently altogether unlikely to attract fanfare. The hole is an imprint of a rodent–a rat, or as some hypothesize, a squirrel–who, according to legend, fell into fresh cement some twenty years ago and was recently filled by a mysterious party other than local authorities. Concerned for the preservation of the hole, a persistent neighbor excavated the hole with his license plate, and ever since social media posts have gone viral. By now, the Chicago Rat Hole is a tourist attraction that competes with Millennium Park’s Bean and has been dubbed Chicago’s Stonehenge by The New York Times.

With news of the Chicago Rat Hole traveling far and wide, I learned about it from a friend in Boston on Sunday morning. Due to the phenomenon’s esotericism, I could not resist visiting the site the same day. By then, the Chicago Rat Hole already had its own Wikipedia page, heaps of media attention, and a designated marker listing it as a “museum” on Google Maps. All following a January 6, 2024, tweet by Chicago-based comedian and writer Winslow Dumaine. Ever since, the location has become a pilgrimage site. The Riot Fest Historical Society also dedicated a plaque to it:

At the time of my visit, I also found a poem dedicated to the hole:

“In the heart of Chicago a hole does appear,

a rat-shaped void drawing people near.

Emotions ran deep, a conductive sigh. Gathering round, under the city sky.

Lay your respects, and let feelings flow.

In this sidewalk shrine, let compassion grow…”

To my surprise, we joined a group of Gen Zs and families willing to take pictures with- and pay tribute to the hole and queued there for approx. 15 minutes before our moment with the rodential shrine. The hole, filled with melted snow water and coins, was adorned with a wide array of offerings: cheese sticks cheese bags, chapsticks, oranges, rubber duckies, poems, dollar notes, mugs, a red wine bottle, Starbucks mugs, mints, an American flag, candies, plastic cutlery, a miniature pizza, roses, fast-food, and most importantly Malört. The latter is Chicago’s signature drink, whose “bitter taste is savored by two-fisted drinkers.”

The Chicago Rat Hole is a has been turned into a sacred place that draws pilgrims from around the city and beyond. Pilgrims dedicate material and immaterial offerings that appear to be inspired by tension between the nature and culture. The hole has become a monument to an Alicia Keysian “concrete jungle where dreams are made of ”― an imprint of culture. At the same time, it is a “random imprint of nature,” left in the concrete jungle we create. The two–nature and culture–are inseparable and the Chicago rat hole is just another, urban reminder of it.

 The Chicago Rat Hole raises the question of what constitutes a good monument. Should it be necessary a statue of a rider mounted on a horse, a much-beloved figure that goes back to the Egyptian, Assyrian, and Persian reliefs, or can it simply be a hole in the ground? Does a monument even need to be monumental—a shiny object–like the Bean in the heart of the city, or can it be a part of the humdrum of an average neighborhood? Is it that Chicago needs another tourist attraction while the Bean is closed for renovation until spring 2024? Whose answer holds weight, and who gets to decide?

Among these many questions, The Chicago Rat Hole appeals to me as a site of kin-making. Ever since the hole was restored, there was at least one wedding and a marriage proposal that took place at the site. All of this is on a sidewalk. But clearly, not any kind of a sidewalk. Moreover, the Chicago Rat Hole shows that kinship can be troubled and not only taken for granted by humans. It is a monument to how kinning between the human and non-human is ongoing, not only in the remote places that are dear to early anthropological writing but also in urban sprawls, such as Chicago with its many schismogenic reactions to gentrification, beautification, and neighborhood citizenship. Chicago Rat Hole highlights the city that in 2022 claimed the title of being a rat capital of the US for the eighth year in a row.

The Chicago Rath Hole also reminded me of the zooarchaeological record at EBA Çukuriçi Höyük, which exhibits a notable absence of birds, despite suitable habitats nearby (Cveček 2022: 116). While water and sky bird remains are identified, their proportion is minimal compared to other wild animals. This scarcity cannot be attributed to a lack of birds in the landscape. It suggests that the residents of EBA Çukuriçi Höyük had a longstanding aversion to bird consumption, potentially due to the time-consuming nature of bird hunting with limited returns. Alternatively, I considered a non-economic explanation as well. Yortan cemetery in western Anatolia, dating to EBA 1/2, reveals bird-shaped vessels accompanying the dead. Water bird symbolism in Yortan's grave goods pottery, the absence of similar pottery shapes in settlements like Çukuriçi Höyük, and a brightly-burnished bird-shaped 'askos' from EBA 1 Bakla Tepe may suggest a shared association of water birds with the deceased during EBA 1 in western Anatolia hints, expanding the significance beyond the realm of bird aversion. It may be that shared aversion to rats and their association with unsanitary conditions in urban areas may have equally been a trigger for making the strange familiar, unwelcome welcome, mundane sacred, ordinary uncanny, and an outsider kin–that goes beyond the realm of human kinship.

Unfortunately, 2024’s Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) Annual Meeting ended before Chicago’s rat mania. However, I was fortunate enough to discuss “Kinship Trouble” in a workshop titled “Kinship Trouble: Traversing Interdisciplinary Boundaries between Archaeology, Archaeogenetics, and Socio-cultural Anthropology” co-organized with Maanasa Raghavan (University of Chicago) and Penny Bickle (University of York) at the beginning of January 2024. Together with other brilliant speakers, namely Eduardo Amorim (California State University, Northridge) Beth K. Scaffidi (University of California), Jennifer Raff (The University of Kansas), and Peter Whiteley (American Museum of Natural History), we addressed the topic in interdisciplinary ways, including the kinning between the living and the dead in Peru.

Chicago’s Rat Hole shows how mundane can be turned into sacred and unappealing into something to be celebrated. Aversion to rats (or squirrels) has been challenged by the Chicago Rat Hole, which recently evoked strong feelings of community building that Chicagoans are very good at and willing to preserve. How else can you best preserve something that you deeply care about other than proclaiming its sacredness and long-enduring afterlife?