Chicago's Greatest Year, 1893: The White City and the Birth of a Modern Metropolis

Epilogue: Chicago’s Next Great Year

301 NEpilogue O Chicago’s Next Great Year In its issue of April 19, 2010, Newsweek magazine published an article entitled “100 Places to Remember before They Disappear .” To the surprise of a lot of midwesterners, Chicago was one of those places.According to the piece,which pictured what might happen to the planet if climatologists’ predictions of climate change turned out to be accurate,Chicago“could experience a gradual yet dramatic increase in heat waves and flooding.” Chicago’s city government recognizes the perils of climate change and has developed what it calls the “Chicago Climate Action Plan,” but not too many people consider Newsweek’s gloomy scenario when they ponder Chicago’s future. Rather, they look at the city’s strengths and challenges from other points of view: economic, cultural, social, political, and so on. Will Chicago ever have another year like 1893? It’s not likely because the thesis of this book has been that such a concentration of events was possible only because Chicago was growing so fast. Chicago is no longer an “adolescent” city, and its growth is more measured. But, barring such a catastrophic spike in world temperatures that Lake Michigan inundates the Loop, Chicago’s future contains many favorable prospects, not least because, as it did at the beginning of the twentieth century, it has civic organizations dedicated to its betterment. Nor is its immense geographical advantage at the center of the midland empire going to go away. The political scientist Larry Bennett 302 Epilogue has written that Chicago has gone through two historical stages and is now entering a third. The first stage was Chicago’s emergence as a great industrial center in the period from the Civil War to the mid-twentieth century. The second consists of the “Rust Belt” years from around 1950 to 1990. The present stage is that of Chicago’s reinventing itself as a postindustrial world metropolis. This city has a revitalized urban core but a belt of impoverished neighborhoods at its edges. It has a large group of middle-class professionals who value its “urban amenities” and a changing ethnic mix involving large numbers of immigrants from Mexico and a growing population of Asian heritage. This city, he says, is a “work in progress.”1 A major thing that Chicago has going for it is the diversity of its economy. In 2003, a report by Moody’s Investors Service ranked Chicago as the city with the most diverse economy in the United States. Even when the recession of 2008 arrived, the city was seen as less vulnerable than others to large economic swings. The city’s economic diversity can be seen in the impressive number of major corporations that are based in either Chicago or its environs. Among them are Kraft Foods, Abbot Laboratories, Boeing, McDonald’s, Sara Lee, Aon, Archer Daniels Midland, Allstate, Sears, Caterpillar, OfficeMax, Motorola, UAL, Navistar, Walgreen, and R. R. Donnelley. The administration of Mayor Richard M. Daley was assiduous in courting corporations and scored some significant successes, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel has strenuously continued these efforts. The city has never been, like Detroit, a one-industry town, and this diversity not only has saved it from the declines suffered by other “Rust Belt” cities but also has positioned it well for the challenges of the twenty-first century. A second important factor in the city’s future is demographics . As journalist Alan Ehrenhalt has explained it, for the past few decades Chicago has been undergoing what is known as a “demographic inversion.” This phenomenon is sometimes described as “gentrification,” but it involves deeper changes than that term suggests. Chicago, according to this analysis, is becoming more like a European city. The poor and the recent Chicago’s Next Great Year 303 arrivals are being pushed to the periphery, and the city center is becoming a place where the prosperous both work and live—a “24/7” downtown. It’s not that swarms of people are abandoning the suburbs and flocking back into the city, but, as Ehrenhalt puts it, “We are living at a moment in which the massive outward migration of the affluent that characterized the second half of the twentieth century is coming to an end.”2 The reasons for this trend are varied. They include highway congestion and the rising price of gasoline, which make suburban commuting increasingly difficult; different lifestyle choices by young people, who...