Roadside attractions used to draw people to slow down for a spell: A 20-foot fiberglass muffler man or a giant ball of string would lure you to pull off the highway, snap a photo, then move on. But in these online-obsessed days, our fascination with the weird can become an irritation. We stop to film a TikTok, getting in each others’ way as we turn a curiosity into consumable content, and somehow create outrage out of a simple oddity.
A year ago today, Chicago comedian and artist Winslow Dumaine took traditional roadside action when he first saw a rat-shaped hole in a Roscoe Village sidewalk. A friend had brought the odd little imprint to his attention, and he snapped a photo like any bemused traveler would. Rather than tucking it into a photo album, though, he posted the image to his X account: “Had to make a pilgrimage to the Chicago Rat Hole,” he wrote to his 4,000 followers.
The post did numbers — despite the fact that this hole had been there for some two decades, and despite the fact that it very well could have been a squirrel. (Among the many indignities of being a squirrel, being mistaken for a rat has to be toward the top of the list.)
Dumaine chalks the initial excited reception — his post got more than 5 million views — to the image providing some comedic relief to winter boredom and to the negative news cycle, entering a fraught election year. A viral moment that could actually be experienced in the material world hit the right note at the right time. “There was this small, cute, funny thing that allowed people to build an impromptu sense of community around something so silly as a rat slap mark in cement,” he says.
As a comedian and artist, Dumaine sees it as his role to point out the joy in the mundane: “There are so many people in the world who think that beauty is pretty paintings of aesthetically pleasing people and sunsets. No, a rat hole in the cement, a rusted chain link fence, a car with no tires — all of these things, to me, are also beautiful. And for a moment, people saw it, too.”
The hole soon took on an altar-like status, with visitors making offerings to the imprint: candles, loose change, flowers, a bag of cinnamon rolls. Chicagoans would chat with one another about the popularization of the landmark, which many had known and loved for years. In fact, it’s been the unofficial mascot of a local softball team for some time. Don De Grazia, the team’s manager and pitcher, nicknamed the rat/squirrel Li’l Stucky. That moniker went up against others in a contest held by the Lakeview Roscoe Village Chamber of Commerce. The winning entry was Splatatouille.
As more people took notice, though, the content-creators and capitalists turned the hole into a headache. Like with out-of-touch adults asking if something is “brat,” the cringe took hold first: State Representative Ann M. Williams posted a video online promoting the site as “the jewel of the 11th district.” It became the site of a proposal (??) and a wedding (???).
Then came the vitriol. As beloved a landmark it was for neighbors, they could tolerate only so many late-night visits from loud, drunk Chicagoans and so much daytime sidewalk congestion. One purported neighbor took to Reddit to beg for the public’s mercy, citing nosy reporters, missed mail deliveries because of the crowds, and more nuisances.
Dumaine himself became the target of online trolls, with one resident threatening to sue him because he couldn’t find street parking and another person claiming nobody cared about the rat hole until a white man came and colonized it. Says Dumaine: “The dipshits and NIMBYs and people who are addicted to online anger changed the narrative in a way that made it so much less fun.”
Part of that deterioration of fun was the commodification of the rat hole. Dumaine acknowledges that his shop (he sells everything from tote bags to tarot decks) received a large boost in orders after his post went viral, but for the most part, he has steered clear of hawking rat-hole-themed merchandise. “That is the definition of putting all of your eggs into the flimsiest goddamn basket,” he says. “There like 40 Twitter accounts for the fly that landed on Mike Pence’s head in the debates in 2020, right? I know multiple people who made accounts for the Chicago alligator. I never wanted it to be 2026, and I’m holding shirts being like, ‘Hey guys, I’m the rat hole guy. Remember me?’” He also didn’t want to play any further part in turning a whimsical sidewalk site into a recognized tourist destination. “I didn’t want anybody to put up guard rails around it,” he quips.
To be clear, there is one rat hole-related item that Dumaine sells. Someone sent him a 3D model of the hole, which he used to make a silicone mold. If anyone wants a replica of the rat hole, he asks them to donate $25 or more to Sarah’s Circle, a women’s shelter in Uptown. He’s raised about $3,000 for the nonprofit.
Despite the enormous amount of delight and handwringing revolving around the sidewalk imprint — with an attempted fill-in and its eventual removal by the city — Dumaine considered the whole experience a footnote to his 2024. The year also saw him start his podcast (I’m from the Internet), tour the country doing stand-up (the rat hole made it into his act), and develop a card game. “The rat hole was just this breath of air for me at the start of the year before focusing on an enormity of work. But the attention put on me did offer me encouragement, I guess, of people actually seeming to engage with me and making it feel like I’m not just screaming out into the void.”
He continues to keep an eye out for bits of low-stakes whimsy in the world. “There’s this quote from somewhere that graffiti in the bathroom, limericks written on the wall in Sharpie, is the highest form of art, because it’s not done for profit: It’s not done for notoriety,” Dumaine says. “It’s just a person with a pen talking to another anonymous person with a pen. Creating a world where we focus on 10,000 pretty and interesting little things and moments of storytelling in our life is what makes us feel like we live in a real world and not in a reactionary hellscape.”
Even if sometimes the public ends up making a mountain out of a molehill. Or in this case, a canyon out of a rat hole?