Despite Problems, Chicagoans Optimistic About City

CHICAGO (Aug. 22) -- When Democratic delegates begin arriving in Chicago this weekend, they will follow generations who have come to the gleaming city by the lake and found it bright with promise. Carl Sandburg called it the "city of the big shoulders, hog butcher to the world."

But the stockyards are gone now, just a gate for tourists to pose at. They're as much history as gangster Al Capone, who is in a museum now.

Democratic delegates will find a city full of history and legend, like the great Chicago fire of 1871. Like Norman Rockwell's 1930 drawing of the cow who may have started it. Like Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the black fur trader who may have started the place.

The shoulders wear suits and carry briefcases now. But fortunes are still to be made.

"You could say that it is a city that has gone from a swamp, to a slaughterhouse, to futures markets," says Chicago journalist John Calloway. "Financial futures markets where a trillion dollars a day flies around electronically in the air. That's the new Chicago." (96K WAV sound)

Henry Binford, a professor at Northwestern University, described the city's transformation: "What's happened is that Chicago has lost a lot of those jobs, more than a million industrial jobs since the 1950s, but it has at the same time gained lots of other kinds of economic activity."

Some of the old neighborhoods survive. Some don't. And sometimes, the old families move out and new families, from new places, move in.

Says Binford: "The city's population continues to be renewed and rearranged by the arrival of newcomers, as it's always been. This has always been a city of people who came from somewhere else, in large degree."

And a lot of them, including companies like Motorola and families, have moved to the suburbs.

"If you go out the Eisenhower (Expressway) and Route 88, it used to be that you would go along farmland, and today you just see this huge mile after mile of gleaming office buildings," said Calloway.

When twenty-year Mayor Richard J. Daley said jump, aldermen said, "How high?" Today, son Richard M. Daley lacks his father's clout and must form coalitions instead.

"Richard M. Daley is left to clean up the mess his father Richard J. Daley left him," Calloway said. "I'm talking about public schools that don't function and I'm talking about black neighborhoods that don't have any jobs."

Chicago, like other big cities, has haunted public housing, where rats and rubble have replaced hope, where children wonder what a future is.

But it has always had a sense of style too, and a recent survey showed Chicagoans are optimistic about their city.

The city's architecture is famous, with classics like the Tribune Tower and newer work like the Hancock Building and the Sears Tower.

They still play jazz here. A shopper can walk along Michigan Avenue and have every affluent daydream come to life.

On the right day, in the right light, the lake and the skyline look like magic. It's a toddlin' town where all the different waves of immigrants can hope their dreams come true.

This story originally appeared on CNN's "Inside Politics."

Chicago Prepares To Welcome Democrats -- July 31, 1996

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Despite Problems, Chicagoans Optimistic About City

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