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

Life, as the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, is a pendulum that swings between pain and boredom. But Schopenhauer could not account for the elation with which residents of Chicago embraced an unlikely attraction this month: a hole in a sidewalk shaped like a rat.

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

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

By Friday afternoon, however, the pendulum had taken another swing as residents banded together to fix the hole — in this case by restoring 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 feel the preservation of history is important,” he said.

Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit news organization that covers Chicago’s neighborhoods, reported that by the early afternoon, the hole had been, uh, made whole, because local residents went to work to dig out the substance.

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