I moved out of Chicago in 2020. I was a lifelong resident. It’s funny, the only reason I spent my entire life in Chicago was the trading floor. I would have been in another city if the trading floor had been somewhere else. Of course, without the trading floors, Chicago would have been a grease spot on the prairie. St. Louis would have been the center of the universe when it came to the Midwest.
As I have blogged about before, my wife and I went through many machinations to decide where to move. We tried out Nashville, Jacksonville, Austin, and other destinations. We settled on Las Vegas.
You can find pros and cons in every city and place. There is no perfect place to live in the US.
So, what do I miss about Chicago?
I miss Italian beef. My friend
, who writes for Wirepoints, is doing an Italian beef tour in Chicago now. He posts photos on Facebook and I drool. The companion foods of Chicago hot dogs and Italian sausage or Polish also apply. There isn’t any here in Las Vegas that is worth your time. I went to a “Chicago-centric” place in Vegas and they gave me a beef on a french baguette.I miss the tavern pizza and Lou Malnati’s. I can order Malnati’s frozen; it is good but not the same. Las Vegas pizza is generally pretty lackluster. It’s so bad I put an Alfa One pizza oven in my backyard.
I miss my butcher. I used to go to Apple Market on Clark and Rob Leavitt at Publican and they’d take care of me. Rob makes the best pate! We have one in Vegas, Featherblade, that approaches them that I frequent. I miss my cheese shop but of course, it’s out of business in Chicago now. I miss Binny’s and Vin on Elston. Binny’s and Vin were much better stores than Total Wine which we have here in Vegas.
Since Covid, you can order a lot of stuff online and get it delivered.
I miss the University Club, my friends there, and my yoga instructor Todd. I still take the Monday class with Todd and it’s good but not the same since Todd can’t lay his hands on me and push me that extra mile. He has bony knees. If you sign up for Todd’s class I will see you on Zoom.
Of course, you miss Wrigley or the United Center. But, you can fly in for a game. I try and catch the Blackhawks when they play here in Vegas. The Chicago people do shots of Malort just because. I don’t miss Soldier Field. We sold our PSLs when we knew we were going to move. Vegas has the Raiders and Allegiant is a lot nicer. I am hoping the Oakland A’s finally stop their dalliance and commit to coming to Vegas. I have triple-A Aviators tickets with a friend I met who moved here from California.
I am an urban person after growing up in the western Chicago suburbs. I like to walk to stuff and I want short trips and variety. You could get anything you wanted in Chicago if you knew where to look. Las Vegas isn’t urban at all. It’s suburban and the Strip is the Strip.
However, there is plenty I don’t miss about Chicago at all. I am glad I left because I left for the right reasons. I don’t miss the traffic. Vegas doesn’t have traffic. I can get from my place to the Strip or the airport in about seventeen to twenty minutes door to door.
I don’t miss the garbage all over the place. I don’t miss the crime, especially the random crime that is escalating all the time now. Lori Lightfoot inherited a city in a garden and she let it grow lots of weeds. That includes the real gardens that were in parks that made the city so beautiful and livable.
I don’t miss the taxes and the constant threat that taxes would go up. The costs to live in Chicago or the state of Illinois are enormous compared to the services you get. Every time you paid a tax or a fee, you felt like you were getting robbed.
I don’t miss the weather at all. People will say “Vegas is hot” and for around two months out of the year, they are right. But even when it’s crazy hot here you can do stuff in the morning and you can do stuff in the evening. It’s much easier to conduct life in a t-shirt and shorts than with twenty pounds of clothing on you.
The lake in Chicago is beautiful. You get glimpses of it through buildings if you are close enough and not right on it. Of course, in the winter you don’t want to be there and in the summer, it’s often not safe. In Las Vegas, you never get sick of looking at the mountains and because Vegas is a small city, they seem like they are on top of you.
When we moved from Chicago, we had a couple of thoughts about integrating ourselves. If you don’t have kids in school, meeting people is different. One thing we did was move into an established neighborhood. We joined a golf club and frankly, that has been good for our social life because so many other people were new and moving here too. A group of older gentlemen play golf every day and invited me into their group. A few of us are under 65 but most people are 70+. We have one famous one in our group and one guy who is 91 that can still shoot in the 70s.
It’s 10 degrees cooler here than in Phoenix which is good sometimes, and bad other times. Where I live in Summerlin is five degrees cooler than the Strip.
It’s easier to do things in Vegas than in Chicago if you want to go somewhere. This is particularly true if you want to hike, bike, or ski. I will be on my road bike again soon and the biggest difference between Vegas and Chicago is Vegas has real hills.
Honestly, if you live in LA or SF, I don’t know why you’d stay given what’s going on there. Same with Chicago. We have friends down the street that just moved here from NYC and they say the same. The progressive freight train left the station long ago and it’s not stopping. If you stay and fight, you should read the story of Sisyphus.
I have friends that moved to Florida and I have friends that moved to Texas. I have friends that moved to Tennessee and friends that moved to Indiana. They are happy there.
If you are older there are reasons you might stay. I get it. If you are younger, you ought to move to where there is opportunity. If I was moving back to Chicago, I’d be looking in Northwest Indiana and that’s unless Wisconsin got rid of its high taxes which the Republicans there are pushing for.
Politically, Nevada is a “purple” state but it is trending Democratic. They are trying to pass a bunch of crap that won’t help like ranked-choice voting. The Republican Party here isn’t that strong, but certain people and candidates are. Because Nevada is very libertarian from its founding, that culture is hard to break. But, the Harry Reid Democrats are trying. It would be one thing that would get me to leave.
I left DuPage County for Western North Carolina in 2019 after my LaSalle Street job ended. I’m just glad that I’m not around to see Chicago degrade further. It is hard to look forward and be a positive person in Chicago when your way of life and values are being attacked from all directions. I’ve even stopped following all news from Chicago as it’s like injecting poison into your soul.
My biggest advice for a happy retirement (or life) is to move someplace that you consider to be beautiful. Your environment influences your outlook every minute of the day, so you need to maximize its influence. We enjoyed Chicago when it was ruggedly beautiful, and it was a great place to be successful, but those days are gone for many. It’s a city living on its past accomplishments. I think it’s very telling that a city famous for its architecture no longer builds architecturally significant buildings.
Great chronicle, well told, says the 40+-year resident of Austin By God Texas who just moved to Savannah, Georgia (home of 2X National Champ Dawgs) to be close to family.
We will all prosper wherever we plant ourselves. That is the great thing about America, we can move without government permission.
I live three doors down from My Perfect Daughter, the #1 ranked SIL in the US, and My Three Perfect Granddaughters -- one of whom will be POTUS one day.
I go to see #1 granddaughter air out her jump shot in an hour and life could not possibly be better.
[Well, if we had a real President, God? But I'm not greedy.]
Only in America. Let's keep it going.
JLM
www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com