I’ve lived in Chicago all my life. I’m planning my escape but the housing market has temporarily tripped me up.
Perhaps you have had to live in Chicago to appreciate how hollowed out it has become. I remember as a young guy my father taking me to Sears flagship store on south State street, and then Carson Pirie Scott with its ornate iron gate entrance designed by Louis Sullivan, it was like the entry to some kingdom, and further north was Marshall Fields, where I first tasted a Frango mint. Later, my father and I went to a car show at the Chicago Stockyards. This is before they built the latest McCormick Place. Chicago was a sprawling empire of small successes. The Loop, the core downtown area was a melting pot, black, white, latino, and nobody cared, abundant cheap eats, a juice bar at the South Shore station that sold a coconut mango drink to die for, drinking it on the way out you saw a row of shoe shines. Men still wore suits and good leather shoes. They took pride in their appearance.
On the north side, Wrigley Field on Tuesday was ladies’ day and women attended the ball game for free. My grandmother told me she used to go as often as she could, and the Andy Frain ushers weren’t too strict and if there were empty box seats after the third inning they would let people go down and sit and enjoy the great view, and in hushed tones she would tell me that someone always had a fifth of some adult beverage and they would all pass it around, laugh, watch the game, cheer for the home team. The train or “el” cost 65 cents, or 75 cents with a transfer, and on Sunday you could get a super-transfer for $1.50 that allowed you to ride the train all day.
A city made for the working class.
One of my first jobs was downtown on Wabash at a bookstore. I worked with a guy from Minnesota and a woman who moved here from West Virginia. On separate occasions, I asked them why they came all the way to Chicago. Both of their answers were basically the same.
“I knew I could find a good job, and get an affordable apartment.”
Maybe those weren’t the best days and I’m jaded, but the people who made this city work lived in and loved the city for all its flaws because the city, in its own way, loved them back. And now that is all gone.
I have spent as much time in Chicago as any city in the US. And I never lived there. I grew up in Detroit and used to go to Chicago for fun- for years. Later, in business, even while living in the Southeast as I have for 30 years now, I spent even more time in Chicago- weeks at a time, for years. It was, to me, the Greatest American City. Everything else was second to me. The architecture, the arts, the sports teams (who I grew up hating, but loved the fan base nonetheless), the different parts of town, the diversity of people from all over the world, and the neighborhoods that reflected it. Mostly though- it was always the City of Broad Shoulders. Do the young even know what the means anymore? Does Lori Lightfoot?
As someone who worked all over the US- in it's major cities- I had given up on San Francisco earlier than Chicago. And that hurt, but not the hurt I felt about 4 years ago when I knew I had to start watching where I went and when I went about Chicago. This, coming from a guy who grew up in Detroit.
I feel sadder about the state of Chicago than I do about any of our other lost or losing US cities- and there's a huge list right now. Chicago was the Capital of Middle America. It was New York, if New York was cleaner and accessible with better architecture. Not anymore. And I miss it. I quit going to Chicago when covid hit the nation and decided to leave my business and start to live. Now I just look to it to see any signs of it coming back. Instead I hear of my middle aged professional relatives, who currently live in the City, looking to move out of state. No one is coming back soon.
I miss Chicago. What it was, what it meant to so many of us- and not just native Chicagoans. And I wonder who is going to be left who gives a damn? And not for nothing, but JB Pritzker as Governor is about the worst answer for those who love the city. He could give a shit. Republicans in Illinois are about as useless as an Edsel in your driveway. That any Democrat would get any vote from the public given their track record of destroying this, and every other city in America astonishes me. Why do people care so little about their own lives as to keep voting in the people who helped destroy their very neighborhoods, their city, while they enrich themselves?
I'll have memories of this great city to stay with me, but I wonder if I'll ever again be able to talk my wife into a 'Chicago getaway'. Why bother? We can't even walk around and enjoy the place.
Agree with your sentiments. Chicago was always the place you went to a big city if you were from the Midwest. Grow up in Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, and Chicago was it. Other cities like Minneapolis, St. Louis, KC, Indianapolis, Louisville, Detroit, Milwaukie, had smatterings of what you could get in Chicago but not the whole enchilada.
San Francisco is horrible. Was my fav US city. I went there for a board meeting in Jan 2020, and at the meeting I mentioned "if we could do these virtually from now on that would be great so I don't have to come to SF". Then Covid hit.
It is amazing that the true believers are blinded by data. Their hate for free markets, competition, and Republicans runs so deep it is hard to measure. if you are Republican, you are automatically a Nazi or racist and that was before Trump.
As a MNn (born in Mpls tho'), I agree with this description about Mpls vs Chicago. After I visited Chicago a few years ago for a weekend (yes, that's all it took), I realized that the Twin Cities only pretend to be big, to be taken seriously but they aren't.
That said, however, the decline of the Twin Cities is just as shocking to me as to you guys writing about Chicago. What the Twin Cities lacked Big City-wise, it made up for by being open and accessible everywhere. Utterly safe, almost like a small-town.
A local writer for The American Experiment, Bill Glahn, thinks this is all on purpose. He wrote a Twitter thread that's now gone, but I saved.
<quote>
The mistake is believing that the decline of Minneapolis is due to incompetence, poor governance, bad luck, or forces beyond their control. Decline is a choice. In this instance, decline is a strategy.
And the end goal being …. A city that better matches the interests and goals of the people in charge.
The goal of the last crop of leaders was to create a “luxury city” along the lines of New York and San Francisco. A walkable city for empty nesters full of interesting restaurants.
What went wrong?
Empty-nester progressive condo owners don’t share the same goals as the wokerati. The more luxury condos, the greater the demand for public safety, walkable streets, and functioning services. The wokerati have no ability or interest or providing those items. Too “conservative. ”
The current skyline and downtown housing boom is evidence of their success. But that success brought new expectations for public safety and functioning services.
Two different and incompatible visions are in conflict. New Detroit is winning, luxury condoland is losing.
</quote>
Comments like this or this article always remind me of "Curley Effect".
<quote>
The reason why Detroit and Newark never recovered is that the people in charge of the ruins preferred to rule over the ashes.
A model of the Curley effect, in which inefficient redistributive policies are sought … by incumbent politicians trying to shape the electorate through emigration of their opponents or reinforcement of class identities.
Brilliant comment. That's exactly what will happen to Chicago. My wife always said, Chicago will be NYC or Detroit. NYC is larger, but more importantly the "network" is open. Chicago's network is closed. Impossible to change that culture.
Yes, of course. To go with my initial comment that had me regularly traveling around the US for business, Minneapolis was one of the cities I got to late in my career. But I was blown away by the Minneapolis metro area. The city itself was so very accessible, beautiful in it's own way (made more beautiful by the surrounding beauty of it's exurbs and Minnesota itself). But the city struck me so much that I remember coming home to (back then) Atlanta and announcing to anyone who would listen that 'Minneapolis is a hidden gem.'. I felt that it was.
And now a few years later it's been torched, looted, reprimanded, had removal of police, and the institutionalizing of 'payback time'. Whatever that means, and however it turns out.
And as it turns out, Minneapolis is another example of getting what we elected.
In the case of most of our great US cities, it's a shame that those running things or demanding things never got to see these cities in their glory, when they could make an adult walking down the street go 'Oh...wow'. Today if I make that sort of comment, it probably means I stepped off the wrong curb in San Francisco.
Philly is the same only about 5 years behind. Republican Party evaporated years ago. They made a conscious trade, surrendering to overall D governance in return for specific patronage jobs/money in specific municipal agencies. Then eventually got screwed out of the jobs/money. It’s a pattern and I don’t see how it reverses.
For years on every other Saturday, I used to take the 5:55 a.m. Northwestern train and roll into the Ogilvie Transportation Center and then make the three mile walk to the museum campus. Sometimes I would go into one of the museums, and then wander back to the Loop---grab lunch at one of the iconic Chicago restaurants and grab a train home. I stopped doing this in 2016 because of the violence. I don't feel safe walking around and I worry about driving into Chicago waiting to be pistol-whipped and carjacked while sitting at a red light. Excellent commentary Jeff. It's hard to believe Chicago, the once great city, is in such decline.
Every time I read another of your Chicago write ups, I think that it will be repetitive, and then I'm left with my tongue hanging out and learn something new. Congrats on getting out of there.
Some friends of ours just spent some time with us. They live in Chicago and I miss parts of it. But, they said crime has ticked up. It's not the same. A friend of mine from Vegas who is from Chicago rented an apartment there this summer. I will be interested to connect with him to see how it was.
Tragedy unfolding. I would say this about feckless Republicans in places like this. They know they are only there to play a role a make a few bucks for little work. Any decent conservatives are identified and relentlessly destroyed before gaining any clout, so the only ones that rise are the already captured. Vote fraud also plays a large role in this. So to say Republicans are feckless is to kind of ignore the very real reasons why. If the Dems there didn’t want to create the illusion of a fair system, needing a foil to on which to blame their failures, they would simply not allow any Republicans to exist in their ecosystem.
As late as the mid '80s big chunks of Lake View were drug infested areas. And only losers hung out at Wrigley Field for day games (ask Lee Elia). Most professional people with kids who could lived in the suburbs. We're not back to that level, but it is not trending right.
The city is propped up by upper-middle class people more than 1%-ers. And for them the city is still OK. They are the lawyers, doctors, bankers, accountants, consultants who vote straight D in spite of their own interests. Those are the people of Lincoln Park, Lake View, Lincoln Square, Bucktown etc. For these people CPS schools are OK as long as the teachers are working. The thing that gets me the most is not the high cost. It's the low value. So much money goes to support long ago negotiated pension scams rather than provide services today.
The funniest thing going on now is the city casino. All the politicians want one for the "free money". But the people who live in the areas where the finalist sites are located want nothing to do with them. Casinos are taxes on the innumerate. While a minority of customers are sleaze balls, that's where the sleaze ball go. The Ricketts family is, besides fielding a horrible team, adding a sports book onto Wrigley. I wonder how this adds to the neighborhood that they've invested so much money in. (MLB is doing its best to wreck the product, but that's a different issue.)
What does that mean for Chicago in the future? It's hard to tell as there are mixed signals. Sterling Bay is bullish as Lincoln Yards is actually building. I don't think it's a good place to retire, though.
I got out of the city long before you did. I lived at 2020 Lincoln Park West for a couple years and then my wife and I had a place on Larrabee just north of North Ave. this was before Cabrini was emptied and demolished. We drove through there every single day to get to the gym and then home from the office. While always sketchy, particularly in the summer months, even then crime wasn’t so bad that you couldn’t drive through there. And of course, being so close, sometimes the crime came a little north and things would go missing from my garage.
But we left in 2002 after my first was born. DuPage. And we never looked back. I can’t relate to friends who have sold their places in the ‘burbs and moved back to the city. Even pre Covid, as you pointed out, it was obvious where things were heading. Chicago will be Detroit at some point. The only reason I am still willing to work in the city is the fact that my last two jobs were right across the river from Ogilvie (CME and now 110 N Wacker, which is an even shorter walk). But for that we avoid the city at all costs. I won’t do anything in the Loop on a weekend unless I am comfortable I can carry.
I watched for years as the Loop slowly developed residences which then led to a more robust retail environment on the weekends which attracted more residents….
That’s over. I think the cycle is going to start quickly taking the reverse course.
I’ve lived in Chicago all my life. I’m planning my escape but the housing market has temporarily tripped me up.
Perhaps you have had to live in Chicago to appreciate how hollowed out it has become. I remember as a young guy my father taking me to Sears flagship store on south State street, and then Carson Pirie Scott with its ornate iron gate entrance designed by Louis Sullivan, it was like the entry to some kingdom, and further north was Marshall Fields, where I first tasted a Frango mint. Later, my father and I went to a car show at the Chicago Stockyards. This is before they built the latest McCormick Place. Chicago was a sprawling empire of small successes. The Loop, the core downtown area was a melting pot, black, white, latino, and nobody cared, abundant cheap eats, a juice bar at the South Shore station that sold a coconut mango drink to die for, drinking it on the way out you saw a row of shoe shines. Men still wore suits and good leather shoes. They took pride in their appearance.
On the north side, Wrigley Field on Tuesday was ladies’ day and women attended the ball game for free. My grandmother told me she used to go as often as she could, and the Andy Frain ushers weren’t too strict and if there were empty box seats after the third inning they would let people go down and sit and enjoy the great view, and in hushed tones she would tell me that someone always had a fifth of some adult beverage and they would all pass it around, laugh, watch the game, cheer for the home team. The train or “el” cost 65 cents, or 75 cents with a transfer, and on Sunday you could get a super-transfer for $1.50 that allowed you to ride the train all day.
A city made for the working class.
One of my first jobs was downtown on Wabash at a bookstore. I worked with a guy from Minnesota and a woman who moved here from West Virginia. On separate occasions, I asked them why they came all the way to Chicago. Both of their answers were basically the same.
“I knew I could find a good job, and get an affordable apartment.”
Maybe those weren’t the best days and I’m jaded, but the people who made this city work lived in and loved the city for all its flaws because the city, in its own way, loved them back. And now that is all gone.
I have spent as much time in Chicago as any city in the US. And I never lived there. I grew up in Detroit and used to go to Chicago for fun- for years. Later, in business, even while living in the Southeast as I have for 30 years now, I spent even more time in Chicago- weeks at a time, for years. It was, to me, the Greatest American City. Everything else was second to me. The architecture, the arts, the sports teams (who I grew up hating, but loved the fan base nonetheless), the different parts of town, the diversity of people from all over the world, and the neighborhoods that reflected it. Mostly though- it was always the City of Broad Shoulders. Do the young even know what the means anymore? Does Lori Lightfoot?
As someone who worked all over the US- in it's major cities- I had given up on San Francisco earlier than Chicago. And that hurt, but not the hurt I felt about 4 years ago when I knew I had to start watching where I went and when I went about Chicago. This, coming from a guy who grew up in Detroit.
I feel sadder about the state of Chicago than I do about any of our other lost or losing US cities- and there's a huge list right now. Chicago was the Capital of Middle America. It was New York, if New York was cleaner and accessible with better architecture. Not anymore. And I miss it. I quit going to Chicago when covid hit the nation and decided to leave my business and start to live. Now I just look to it to see any signs of it coming back. Instead I hear of my middle aged professional relatives, who currently live in the City, looking to move out of state. No one is coming back soon.
I miss Chicago. What it was, what it meant to so many of us- and not just native Chicagoans. And I wonder who is going to be left who gives a damn? And not for nothing, but JB Pritzker as Governor is about the worst answer for those who love the city. He could give a shit. Republicans in Illinois are about as useless as an Edsel in your driveway. That any Democrat would get any vote from the public given their track record of destroying this, and every other city in America astonishes me. Why do people care so little about their own lives as to keep voting in the people who helped destroy their very neighborhoods, their city, while they enrich themselves?
I'll have memories of this great city to stay with me, but I wonder if I'll ever again be able to talk my wife into a 'Chicago getaway'. Why bother? We can't even walk around and enjoy the place.
I miss it. It's a grave loss for this nation.
Agree with your sentiments. Chicago was always the place you went to a big city if you were from the Midwest. Grow up in Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, Indiana, Michigan, and Chicago was it. Other cities like Minneapolis, St. Louis, KC, Indianapolis, Louisville, Detroit, Milwaukie, had smatterings of what you could get in Chicago but not the whole enchilada.
San Francisco is horrible. Was my fav US city. I went there for a board meeting in Jan 2020, and at the meeting I mentioned "if we could do these virtually from now on that would be great so I don't have to come to SF". Then Covid hit.
It is amazing that the true believers are blinded by data. Their hate for free markets, competition, and Republicans runs so deep it is hard to measure. if you are Republican, you are automatically a Nazi or racist and that was before Trump.
As a MNn (born in Mpls tho'), I agree with this description about Mpls vs Chicago. After I visited Chicago a few years ago for a weekend (yes, that's all it took), I realized that the Twin Cities only pretend to be big, to be taken seriously but they aren't.
That said, however, the decline of the Twin Cities is just as shocking to me as to you guys writing about Chicago. What the Twin Cities lacked Big City-wise, it made up for by being open and accessible everywhere. Utterly safe, almost like a small-town.
A local writer for The American Experiment, Bill Glahn, thinks this is all on purpose. He wrote a Twitter thread that's now gone, but I saved.
<quote>
The mistake is believing that the decline of Minneapolis is due to incompetence, poor governance, bad luck, or forces beyond their control. Decline is a choice. In this instance, decline is a strategy.
And the end goal being …. A city that better matches the interests and goals of the people in charge.
The goal of the last crop of leaders was to create a “luxury city” along the lines of New York and San Francisco. A walkable city for empty nesters full of interesting restaurants.
What went wrong?
Empty-nester progressive condo owners don’t share the same goals as the wokerati. The more luxury condos, the greater the demand for public safety, walkable streets, and functioning services. The wokerati have no ability or interest or providing those items. Too “conservative. ”
The current skyline and downtown housing boom is evidence of their success. But that success brought new expectations for public safety and functioning services.
Two different and incompatible visions are in conflict. New Detroit is winning, luxury condoland is losing.
</quote>
Comments like this or this article always remind me of "Curley Effect".
<quote>
The reason why Detroit and Newark never recovered is that the people in charge of the ruins preferred to rule over the ashes.
A model of the Curley effect, in which inefficient redistributive policies are sought … by incumbent politicians trying to shape the electorate through emigration of their opponents or reinforcement of class identities.
</quote>
Brilliant comment. That's exactly what will happen to Chicago. My wife always said, Chicago will be NYC or Detroit. NYC is larger, but more importantly the "network" is open. Chicago's network is closed. Impossible to change that culture.
Yes, of course. To go with my initial comment that had me regularly traveling around the US for business, Minneapolis was one of the cities I got to late in my career. But I was blown away by the Minneapolis metro area. The city itself was so very accessible, beautiful in it's own way (made more beautiful by the surrounding beauty of it's exurbs and Minnesota itself). But the city struck me so much that I remember coming home to (back then) Atlanta and announcing to anyone who would listen that 'Minneapolis is a hidden gem.'. I felt that it was.
And now a few years later it's been torched, looted, reprimanded, had removal of police, and the institutionalizing of 'payback time'. Whatever that means, and however it turns out.
And as it turns out, Minneapolis is another example of getting what we elected.
In the case of most of our great US cities, it's a shame that those running things or demanding things never got to see these cities in their glory, when they could make an adult walking down the street go 'Oh...wow'. Today if I make that sort of comment, it probably means I stepped off the wrong curb in San Francisco.
Also- I forgot...the food. It was, at one time, the best restaurant city in America.
it is pretty darn good. Much better than Las Vegas. If Chicago chefs woke up, they'd come to Summerlin and set up shop.
They will. Everyone else is showing up in LV.
Philly is the same only about 5 years behind. Republican Party evaporated years ago. They made a conscious trade, surrendering to overall D governance in return for specific patronage jobs/money in specific municipal agencies. Then eventually got screwed out of the jobs/money. It’s a pattern and I don’t see how it reverses.
For years on every other Saturday, I used to take the 5:55 a.m. Northwestern train and roll into the Ogilvie Transportation Center and then make the three mile walk to the museum campus. Sometimes I would go into one of the museums, and then wander back to the Loop---grab lunch at one of the iconic Chicago restaurants and grab a train home. I stopped doing this in 2016 because of the violence. I don't feel safe walking around and I worry about driving into Chicago waiting to be pistol-whipped and carjacked while sitting at a red light. Excellent commentary Jeff. It's hard to believe Chicago, the once great city, is in such decline.
Every time I read another of your Chicago write ups, I think that it will be repetitive, and then I'm left with my tongue hanging out and learn something new. Congrats on getting out of there.
Some friends of ours just spent some time with us. They live in Chicago and I miss parts of it. But, they said crime has ticked up. It's not the same. A friend of mine from Vegas who is from Chicago rented an apartment there this summer. I will be interested to connect with him to see how it was.
Tragedy unfolding. I would say this about feckless Republicans in places like this. They know they are only there to play a role a make a few bucks for little work. Any decent conservatives are identified and relentlessly destroyed before gaining any clout, so the only ones that rise are the already captured. Vote fraud also plays a large role in this. So to say Republicans are feckless is to kind of ignore the very real reasons why. If the Dems there didn’t want to create the illusion of a fair system, needing a foil to on which to blame their failures, they would simply not allow any Republicans to exist in their ecosystem.
This is true. They are the Washington Generals. Unfortunately, no one remembers the Washington Generals.
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/riots-and-looting-in-chicago-wild-scene/
As late as the mid '80s big chunks of Lake View were drug infested areas. And only losers hung out at Wrigley Field for day games (ask Lee Elia). Most professional people with kids who could lived in the suburbs. We're not back to that level, but it is not trending right.
The city is propped up by upper-middle class people more than 1%-ers. And for them the city is still OK. They are the lawyers, doctors, bankers, accountants, consultants who vote straight D in spite of their own interests. Those are the people of Lincoln Park, Lake View, Lincoln Square, Bucktown etc. For these people CPS schools are OK as long as the teachers are working. The thing that gets me the most is not the high cost. It's the low value. So much money goes to support long ago negotiated pension scams rather than provide services today.
The funniest thing going on now is the city casino. All the politicians want one for the "free money". But the people who live in the areas where the finalist sites are located want nothing to do with them. Casinos are taxes on the innumerate. While a minority of customers are sleaze balls, that's where the sleaze ball go. The Ricketts family is, besides fielding a horrible team, adding a sports book onto Wrigley. I wonder how this adds to the neighborhood that they've invested so much money in. (MLB is doing its best to wreck the product, but that's a different issue.)
What does that mean for Chicago in the future? It's hard to tell as there are mixed signals. Sterling Bay is bullish as Lincoln Yards is actually building. I don't think it's a good place to retire, though.
I got out of the city long before you did. I lived at 2020 Lincoln Park West for a couple years and then my wife and I had a place on Larrabee just north of North Ave. this was before Cabrini was emptied and demolished. We drove through there every single day to get to the gym and then home from the office. While always sketchy, particularly in the summer months, even then crime wasn’t so bad that you couldn’t drive through there. And of course, being so close, sometimes the crime came a little north and things would go missing from my garage.
But we left in 2002 after my first was born. DuPage. And we never looked back. I can’t relate to friends who have sold their places in the ‘burbs and moved back to the city. Even pre Covid, as you pointed out, it was obvious where things were heading. Chicago will be Detroit at some point. The only reason I am still willing to work in the city is the fact that my last two jobs were right across the river from Ogilvie (CME and now 110 N Wacker, which is an even shorter walk). But for that we avoid the city at all costs. I won’t do anything in the Loop on a weekend unless I am comfortable I can carry.
I watched for years as the Loop slowly developed residences which then led to a more robust retail environment on the weekends which attracted more residents….
That’s over. I think the cycle is going to start quickly taking the reverse course.