Here are to be found articles about Chicago history and politics, about notable events and natural systems, much about its buildings, politics and urban planning, profiles, and reviews of books about the city as published in Chicago's Reader, Chicago Times, Chicago Enterprise, Inland Architect, Illinois Issues, and Illinois Times. 

 

I moved to the Chicago area (Oak Park) in 1988. I had gotten to know the area slightly in the late 1960s—a girl—but while the girl left, the city stayed behind, and over the years I got to know it better as a tourist and a journalist.

 

Much better. I made new friends, my mind was exercised by new issues, and I discovered in Oak Park a new home, the sort of city Springfield might have turned into had it been populated by Oak Parkers.

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While I was there I did a little business explaining Chicago to Downstate and vice versa, and continued my work for national magazines, but mainly I wrote about Chicago places and issues for Chicago readers. Some of my very best work was done there, a secret life that remained invisible to my Illinois Times readers, where I wrote mainly about Springfield places and issues for Springfield readers.

 

In a few years I’d made a name for myself and was honored to be made contributing editor at two worthy magazines and a regular at two others. Specifically, my feature articles, reviews, and commentaries were published in Chicago's Reader for twenty years beginning in 1978. I was a contributing editor of the bimonthly magazine Chicago Times from 1989 until 1990  and a regular contributor of features and reviews and essays (the last appearing in the column, "Politics and Policy") in Chicago Enterprise magazine, the  monthly of the Commercial Club of Chicago.

 

Architecture loomed large in every sense in Chicago. I was made contributing editor of Inland Architect magazine from 1992 until its sale in 1994, and was a frequent contributor in the 1990s to the "Cityscape" department of the Reader. In 2008 I edited and wrote introductory material for The Plan of Chicago@100, a book of essays about the work of Daniel H, Burnham, published to commemorate the centennial of Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago.

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I was overworked and loved it. I rented space above a drug store, a one-room office  with a frosted glass door and a sink in the corner where I would wash up after being worked over by editors. There was deli across the street, a copy and fax shop downstairs, and up the street an Ace Hardware and a Mobil station that sold chocolate long johns. I'd never been so productive or so happy and would never be again.

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And the big city on the other side of Austin Boulevard? Too many of the Downstaters I know regard Chicago with varying proportions of dread, distaste, confusion, and awe. "Big, noisy," ugly, scary"—these words pretty much exhaust the vocabulary with which casual talk about the place is conducted where I came from.

 

As I noted above, explaining Chicago to the rest of the state became a recurring assignment. But first I had to understand it better myself. The Chicago that shimmers in the minds of most travelers derives from the pages of The Jungle, movies about Al Capone, and highlight footage of Michael Jordan. That none of these emblematic Chicagos is complete, or even representative, is to be expected. The guards at Buckingham Palace are hardly typical of today’s London, any more than the Central Park mugger or the wisecracking cab driver is of Manhattan. But what, then, is “Chicago”?

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The usual approach is to depict Chicago as a king on a throne, with its suburbs, collectively, as a retinue of servants attending to the city’s various needs. It is not a wholly misleading image; no single suburban city rivals Chicago in size, even after several decades of city shrinkage and suburban growth. However, the suburbs are a powerful and growing presence in Illinois’s economy, its politics, and social life. Chicagoland’s suburbs, taken all by themselves, would be the nation's fourth largest metropolitan area, and together they surpass the city in population.

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That shift merely restored the region’s demographic status quo ante. As late as 1860 or so, Chicago counted nearly 110,000 residents, but the combined population in the rest of Cook, Du Page, Kane, Lake, McHenry, and Will counties was nearly a third bigger. The industrialization of the late 1800s caused the big city to metastasize, of course, and for a few decades it outsized its collected neighbors, but only, it should be noted, by gobbling up dozens of them through annexation. From the 1940s through the ‘80s, each census showed the City of Chicago shrinking while the total suburban population went from peak to peak, at a pace that varied only with the vigor of the region’s economy. The result was that by 2000, roughly two of every three citizens of Chicagoland did not live in the city.

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Describing “Chicago” thus demands that one treat the city and its suburbs as parts of a whole. But what constitutes that whole? Urban planners often delineate a region by its people’s common attachment to a government entity. There is no lack of regional governments in greater Chicago—planning authorities, sewage treatment agencies, mental health regions have been around for decades. None are coterminous however, so that every Chicagoland citizen lives in a slightly different place, jurisdictionally defined. And if one lives in 20 regions at once, one doesn’t really live in any one region. Rather, people here identify civic life in terms defined by the neighborhood, the interest group, the ethnic group, the church, not by government boundary-makers.

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“Collar counties” is handy journalistic shorthand for the six counties that have constituted suburban Chicago in the modern era, but no one says they live in “the collar.” In any event Chicago’s collar is being stretched. Regional economists who use commuting patterns to define the boundaries of a region consider today’s Chicago metropolitan area to include not six counties but twelve—eight northeastern Illinois counties, Kenosha County in Wisconsin, and three counties in northwest Indiana. The “Lower Lake Michigan Megalopolis” that the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago takes within its purview is even larger; it includes not only northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana but no fewer than seven Wisconsin counties, including the entire Milwaukee metropolitan area. This is regionalism on the continental rather than the state scale, and thus is useless both to tourists as a means of framing the experience of the place and to a writer attempting to write about it.

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“Greater Chicago” smacks of Chamber of Commerce puffery. “Chicago metropolitan area” is as cumbersome to pronounce as it is to govern. “The Chicago metropolis” is only three syllables more efficient. “Northeast Illinois” is coming into wider usage for sheer lack of an alternative; it is a flexible tarp that can be stretched to fit over an unwieldy geographic pile but it lacks poetry and conciseness.

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“Chicagoland” is preferred by media and marketers, who thus perpetuate a term popularized by Col. Robert McCormick, the late publisher of the Tribune, who with characteristic arrogance defined it as the territory within reach of his newspaper’s delivery system. “Chicagoland” has enough of the taste of theme park in it that it curdles in the mouths of many people as they say it. However, the term now enjoys an academic imprimatur. Historian Ann Durkin Keating needed a title for her book about the region’s development history, and by adopting it made it respectable in polite company. 

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Note: Unlike many Chicagoans, I consider inner-ring suburbs to be a part of the city, which is why you will find here a few pieces about Oak Park and other western suburbs.   

 

To make things easier to find, I moved links to pieces about a few recurring topics to their own pages.

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