Nighthawks at Home

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of visiting The Art Institute of Chicago. One painting I was looking forward to seeing was Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. I'm regularly drawn to and awed by this painting. Here's why.

My wife and I moved to Chicago in late 2019. When we moved to the city, it felt like possibility. A new apartment, a neighborhood to explore, the kind of fresh start that makes you walk around with a little bounce in your step even when you’re lost. We found a favorite corner pub, the family-owned restaurant that was a fixture of the neighborhood, and a stretch of sidewalk where the late sun turned the buildings gold. And then, almost overnight, the streets emptied. Storefronts dark, restaurants shuttered, the city suddenly hollow. It felt less like moving somewhere new and more like moving inside a painting.

Hopper’s Nighthawks kept coming to mind. The fluorescent glow of a diner, a few people gathered but not touching, the streets outside deserted. We were those figures, my wife and I. Sitting by our own little pool of light, still together, still warm, but framed against a city that had stopped moving. We peered out our window at people walking dogs, at delivery drivers masked and rushing, at neighbors across the street leaning on their balconies as if they too were caught in a canvas. The city we’d come to learn revealed itself slowly, like background details you only notice after staring at a painting for a long time.

It wasn’t exactly lonely. We had each other, after all. But it wasn’t together either. The rest of the world was on pause, and we lived in a kind of liminal glow, caught between the old city we’d imagined and the new one we couldn’t yet enter. Hopper painted it in 1942, but in 2020 it felt like he’d left space at the counter for us.