Someone filled the Chicago Rat Hole. Residents took action.

Where have you gone, rat hole in Chicago? Our nation turns its lonely eyes on you.

Life is, as the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, a pendulum that swings back and forth between pain and boredom. But Schopenhauer couldn't explain the elation with which Chicagoans embraced an unlikely attraction this month: a hole in a sidewalk in the shape of a rat.

And on Friday morning, the pendulum swung back to pain: the hole was no longer there. The rat hole was dead. Long live the rat hole. NBC Chicago reports this that the hole, which for weeks had drawn amused onlookers to a quiet residential area in the Roscoe Village neighborhood, had been filled with “what appeared to be plaster or concrete.”

“Someone did this,” Jonathan Howell told NBC Chicago. “A vandal did this.”

By Friday afternoon, however, the pendulum had swung again as residents banded together to fix the hole — in this case, by patching it. Among them was Mr. Howell, who used his Illinois license plate as a scraper to dig out the rodent-shaped crater, the NBC station reported.

“As a Chicagoan, I care about preserving history,” he said.

Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit news organization covering Chicago neighborhoods, reported that by early afternoon the gap had been closed as local residents went to work dig out the substance.

Ann M. Williams, a state representative, had done so said in a video on social media earlier on Friday she said she was “shocked and saddened” to hear the hole had been filled and that she was “closely monitoring this developing situation.”

Hours later she was back share good news. “The Chicago Rat Hole has been restored to its former glory after local residents braved the cold and icy conditions to scrape the plaster-like substance from the Rat Hole,” she wrote. “This is what community is all about.”

The rat hole became a sensation this month after Winslow Dumaine, an artist and comedian, posted a photo of it on social media. (Some residents of Roscoe Village believe that a A squirrel, not a rat, caused the hole.)

Within days, the hole became a source of joy for the city, as residents made pilgrimages to the street's oddities. Many offered coins or built mini shrines around them. Candles and cinnamon rolls were placed next to it. Memes appeared on social media and the hole even got its own Wikipedia page.

It was Chicago's Stonehenge: no one knows exactly how it came to be, but it was something people liked to gather around and stare at for a while.

Then, on Friday, for a few dreary hours, the hole stopped and the city mourned. A source of joy had been stolen from the streets in a sign of civilization's ruthless need to pour cold concrete over our hopes and dreams.

Or was it really that bad?

“Spiritually, when you look at things like this, the reality is that it was never about the phenomenology of a hole,” Mr. Dumaine said in an interview. “It was always about finding something crazy and rallying around it en masse. No one knows where the Ark of the Covenant is. No one knows where the true cross is. Yet Christianity still exists.”

The hole has made Mr Dumaine, 32, a global celebrity. He has conducted interviews with journalists in Poland, France and Canada, among other places, and said he has booked an appearance on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.”

For Mr. Dumaine, and for many Chicagoans, the hole represents a brief respite from a barrage of negative headlines and an opportunity to build a community that will survive the unsuspecting animal that became entangled in a slab of drying concrete.

“Yes, there are people who will spoil the fun, but one person put concrete in the rat hole and thousands of people put coins in it,” Mr Dumaine said. “And I choose to think that those thousands of people who came together and did something really sweet deserve more attention than the person who tried to destroy it.”