Visitors to Chicago’s rat hole put coins and a vape cartridge into it. The hole has existed for decades and is one of 2024’s first cultural phenomena after a tweet about it went viral in January.

Antoin Huynh of Los Angeles takes a photo of the rat hole in Chicago. “It definitely changed me,” he said after seeing it.

On a recent trip to Chicago, I begged my cousin to take me to a hole in a sidewalk shaped like a rat.

I don’t know what exactly drew me to this striking, non-human take on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame. Located in a low-key neighborhood in the city’s north side, the “rat hole” as it’s known to locals, is about a 30-minute drive from most of what you’d typically associate with a day trip into Chicago: the Bean, the museums, Navy Pier. The short, straightforward name of the rat hole isn’t something you say elegantly; it demands to be spit out, with a violence that echoes the way it was formed. Decades earlier, some unfortunate rodent slammed full-force into a patch of wet concrete, leaving a mark so detailed, down to the puffed-out contours of its belly and the digits of its paws, that a paleontologist would sacrifice an arm for it.

Though Chicago’s rat hole has existed for decades as a neighborhood in-joke, it became one of 2024’s first cultural phenomena after a tweet about it went viral in January. Soon, crowds of people would converge on the hole. Some threw estradiol pills or poured Malört........

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