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“Be careful,” was all my friend said, shaking his head. A warning that rings in my mind, standing at the corner of North and Damen next to the Starbucks, down the way from Urban Outfitters. A moment before, I’d spotted another of those street-art rain clouds, but now I’m distracted as a consumer-era hipster in her Puma gear steps to the curb to hail a cab. Or so I thought until her friend pulls up in a… Range Rover. To live, of course, is to change. And Chicago lives emphatically. It pumps life. Stormy, husky, brawling still, just as Carl Sandburg said. “Give Chicago half a chance and it’ll turn you into a philosopher.” That’s Bellow again, with a caution. To which I’ll respectfully add that Chicago might turn you into a farm kid too, fresh in from the hayfields. Twelve years later at the top of Michigan Avenue, I’m still taking a sharp breath as I stare down into a valley of monumental architectural objects. A boldly built town, Chicago is. Once burnt (1871) and boldly built again, leaving it arguably the best city in the world to admire the strata of urban architectural idea. The Deco-Gothic spires around Wacker and Michigan: the Tribune Tower, Wrigley Building, the gilded Carbide and Carbon Building (which used to be a soot-black office tower, by the way, not a Hard Rock Hotel, not sparkling cleaned-up onyx green). But Chicago also has several cities worth of the monolithic and modern. From Daley Plaza at Clark and Washington, you might trace your way south on Dearborn to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Federal Center to feel the sweep of that esthetic impulse. Then jump two blocks east and two generations forward at Millennium Park, where stilt walkers and buskers perform for families under the mirrored Cloud Gate, under the chaotic gaze of Frank Gehry’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion. “Chicago reinvents itself faster than any other U.S. city,” says JC Gabel, the local-born editor-in-chief of the Chicago magazine Stop Smiling, which, by being both hip and enthusiastic about the hometown, could not exist anywhere other than Chicago. And that spirit is reiterated by the many interviewees in the celebratory Chicago Issue. Architect Dirk Lohan (Mies van der Rohe’s grandson) goes so far as to compare the city to Shanghai. But it may be Vince Vaughn, the Lake Forest-raised actor who famously left L.A. to return to Chicago, who most precisely articulates the Chicago geist. He likes the place, he says, because it isn’t driven by fashion. |
