Compass American Guides: Chicago, 3rd Edition Paperback - 2001 - 3rd Edition

Excerpt

Rediscovering Chicago

Nearly 1,800 days of globetrotting over the past 10 years as Chicago Sun-Times travel editor have gradually converted me into a rabid advocate for my own city, whose rough-hewn assets I'd often undervalued until I started spending so much time away from home. Now this guidebook may serve as a soapbox to spread the chauvinistic sermon that salts my conversational sallies among newly met strangers from Paris to Phuket: if you want a crash course in what the United States is all about, there's no better place to begin than Chicago.

"Only in the most indifferent does Chicago fail to awaken an ardent curiosity," was the 1919 bouquet tossed by Henry Justin Smith, managing editor in the Chicago Daily News' literary heyday, when Carl Sandburg even tried his hand (not so memorably) as silent-movie critic. Nelson Algren, who simultaneously adored and despised his hometown, said that living in Chicago "is like being married to a woman with a broken nose: There may be lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real." Norman Mailer, declaiming from the dust raised by the head-busting 1968 Democratic National Convention, pronounced Chicago "perhaps the last of the great American cities." Studs Terkel wrote that Chicago "is America's dream, writ large." Jan Morris, after a 1988 visit, waxed somewhat doubtful, recalling that Chicago once "was the heart of America in all its strength, violence, avarice, homeliness and absurdity." Now, she lamented, "Even Chicago's celebrated self-regard, itself a kind of metaphysical monument, has inevitably lost its power." Nobody today would greet a foreign visitor, as did a nineteenth-century train conductor, with: "Sir, you are entering the Boss City of the Universe."

Indeed, the last Big Boss -- Mayor Richard J. Daley -- has been dead and gone since 1976. His son Richard M. Daley, a resourceful politician but hardly a figure to inspire fearful awe, became mayor in 1987. But the power equation continues to shift. The traditional rivalry between North Siders and South Siders is less relevant today than the jockeying among whites, African-Americans, and Hispanics. Two of Chicago's best-known citizens are indomitable civil-rights activist Jesse Jackson and equally indefatigable talk-show wizard Oprah Winfrey.

Jan Morris may not be entirely wrong when she suggests that "few foreigners give a thought to Chicago from one year to the next." But my own travel encounters indicate that the city's image is improving in one regard: the most famous Chicagoan in far-flung corners of the world is no longer Al Capone. That movie-made mobster was displaced on the marquee of global awareness by basketball's supreme maestro, Michael Jordan. No question -- a slam-dunk is a step up in style from a rat-a-tat-tat.

Visitors and residents amble Chicago to savor the celebrities, the architecture, the lakefront, the museums, the neighborhoods, the dining, the shopping, and the other obvious allures. With a bit of on-the-street effort, those from out-of-town can share the insights and humor of ordinary Chicagoans; despite the thickening of big-city calluses, people here remain more open to strangers than in many another metropolis. With luck, you'll leave Chicago more cheerfully inclined than Rudyard Kipling, who wrote a century ago, "Having seen it, I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages." And you'll likely depart less befuddled than the daddy in Ogden Nash's whimsical verse: "I reel, I sway, I am utterly exhausted./Should you ask me when Chicago was founded I could only reply I didn't know it was losted."