Bit by Bit, City of the Big Shoulders Gets a Head-to-Toe Overhaul

It is called the City of Big Shoulders, a tough town whose image is rooted in a brawling, bloody past that’s part truth and part fiction.

Don’t bother trying to keep up with Chicago, Mark Twain advised more than a century ago. “She outgrows her prophecies faster than she can make them. She is always a novelty, for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.”

Sure enough, those Big Shoulders are shrugging again, putting Chicago through yet another transformation.

Piece by piece, the city of 2.7 million is being reshaped, both by market forces and by a mayor with the political clout and financing to realize his vision of a post-industrial city of public spaces, greenery and a booming tourist economy.

Tourists still take buses along the Al Capone trail. But the 27 million who visited Chicago in 1997 mostly came for the shopping, the architecture and the thriving theater scene, according to city figures. Capone himself wouldn’t recognize the place. He’d find flowers and trees planted along the streets, baskets of flowers dangling from old-fashioned wrought-iron lampposts and planters overflowing with prairie grass and mums.

Moving a Highway

It goes beyond pretty. A lakefront highway has been moved. An airport is to become a park. Funky galleries in the River North neighborhood are overshadowed by “eatertainment” outlets such as Planet Hollywood and the Hard Rock Cafe.

The “Capone’s Chicago” museum, a tourist trap, has given way to the big green frog of the Rain Forest Cafe. Old market streets that once were home to Greek grocers and peep shows have become European-style boulevards lined with flowers and cigar-and-martini-intensive restaurants.

Jackhammers clatter away on construction projects across the Loop. The Goodman Theater is building a new home. Nearby, the historic Oriental Theatre has been rescued from a seedy decline with a grand renovation.

The city has rebuilt itself in a big way before, of course. By 1875, scant evidence of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 remained.

Some compare the changes to the remaking of Paris in the mid-19th century, when Baron Haussmann uprooted neighborhoods to create the grand boulevards of the modern French capital.

“Chicago doesn’t quite have that kind of medieval heritage to destroy. But as neighborhoods change, as old stores, taverns, houses disappear, people miss them,” says University of Chicago political scientist Neil Harris.

“The image of Chicago is of the El, the stockyards, the steel mills, but that in fact is no longer the way the city is,” Harris says. “There’s an image of Chicago becoming feminized, almost, if you use old gender categories.”

Chicago, feminized? The rough-and-tumble Windy City on Lake Michigan? The Prohibition-era stamping ground of the crime syndicate? The birthplace of Playboy magazine?

This is the can-do city that built the world’s tallest skyscraper and reversed the flow of its river to curb disease. The University of Chicago produced America’s first Nobel Prize-winning scientist. This is the metropolis that writers from Rudyard Kipling to Norman Mailer have described as the most American city of all.

Now, says Larry Bennett, a political science professor at DePaul University, “it is becoming a theme park for tourists.”

An Enthusiastic Mayor

But that’s a lament heard in many great American and European cities in the post-industrial age, and it isn’t shared by Mayor Richard M. Daley, Chicago’s version of Baron Haussmann.

Daley speaks of the changes with the passion of an architect or urban planner, reeling off the names of schools that have been improved, parks built, streets beautified. He sounds like the proud proprietor of a family business; after all, a Daley has run Chicago for more than 30 of the last 50 years.

“The city’s like a big puzzle,” Daley says. “There’s more to a city than concrete and steel. There’s life in the city. We’re making it a city to live in, to raise your children in.”

His father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, was immortalized as “The Boss,” an old-school politician who ran the Democratic Machine and whose name seems forever linked with the image of baton-swinging police during the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

But that Daley and that convention are as firmly in the city’s past as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, or the stockyards, which closed in 1971. The Daley currently in City Hall brought the Democrats back in 1996, putting the ghost of convention past to rest.

This Daley is a thoroughly modern mayor, an ex-prosecutor and mountain-bike enthusiast with a passion for architecture and urban life. But while he may be a kinder, gentler Boss, he enjoys something close to political carte blanche in reshaping the city. The City Council does his bidding, and the administration in Washington is friendly and often comes through with grants for Daley’s projects.

“It’s actually sort of thrilling,” says Stanley Tigerman, one of the city’s best-known architects. He compliments Daley for trying “to find somehow a bridge between the environment and profits.”

“Now, if we could figure out how to keep the big developers from entering into the fray or to continue to motivate them without giving away the store.”

There’s the trick.

Beautification is hard to knock. But critics cite Daley’s campaign to rid the streets of newsstands and pushcart vendors, the theme restaurants that draw tourists to the fast-growing River North area, and the proliferation of chain stores where neighborhood businesses once thrived.

“How many Starbucks does a nation need?” asks Wim Wiewel of the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“A lot of it I think doesn’t have to do with any grand plan but is the coming together of the economic restructuring, the demographic changes and the very positive economic cycle,” says Wiewel, dean of the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at UIC.

The university itself is expanding, and taking criticism that it is destroying a piece of old Chicago by pushing aside the old Maxwell Street market, a gritty, grungy street bazaar immortalized in Chicago blues songs, where merchants sold everything from hubcaps to stereos to Polish sausage slathered with grilled onions.

Many Chicagoans can quote Daniel Burnham’s famous comment on his 1907 plan for the city: “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood . . . make big plans; aim high in hope and work.”

And the city has always thought in grand scale, taking pride in having the biggest buildings (the Merchandise Mart is so big it has its own ZIP Code), busiest airport (O’Hare International) and winningest basketball team (the Chicago Bulls).

Architect Tigerman is delighted by some of Chicago’s smaller changes, but many of the larger projects, he says, “I don’t think are so wonderful. There’s more and more below-grade stuff, and there will be more of the same.”

One project that draws his ire is the North Bridge entertainment complex going up a block west of Michigan Avenue, with its planned Disney “virtual amusement park” and ESPN restaurant and bar.

Disney also is adding a store on North Michigan Avenue, where it will share a building with a Saks Fifth Avenue men’s store. Retail vacancy rates on the street are a minuscule 1.3%, and ground-floor space rents for $200 a square foot.

Just east of the Loop, the city plans to use 16 acres of weedy rail yard and outdoor parking lot as a site for a band shell with seating for 30,000, reflecting pool/skating rink, sculpture garden, below-ground parking and transit connections.

Farther south, the city plans to close Meigs Field, a small-plane airport on the lakefront, and turn it into a park in 2002. If the plan goes ahead--politics stalled it once before--the lakefront will be lined by 25 miles of parks from Evanston to the Indiana state line.

That includes the new Museum Campus, a green space created by moving Lake Shore Drive off the swath of land that connects the Shedd Aquarium, Field Museum of Natural History and Adler Planetarium.

Although acknowledging that he hasn’t followed developments too closely, author and commentator Studs Terkel says he’s not impressed.

“The key to Chicago is not downtown,” he says. “That’s great that the Loop’s coming back, with theaters and everything. But I still think neighborhoods are the key to Chicago.”

The mayor denies he is neglecting the neighborhoods.

“There’s more money being spent there than on Michigan Avenue,” he says.

Daley envisions neighborhood transformation starting with public schools; he’s spending $50 million at 100 schools over five years to replace asphalt with grass and trees. He wants to turn school grounds into campuses to be used by the public, while improving education standards.

“If I can’t turn that around, then all these other things are for naught,” he says.

The contrast between old and new Chicago is particularly vivid west of the Loop on Randolph Street, where tony Urban Hair Werks sits hard by the giant egg that marks Pepe’s Meat Packing. Trendy restaurants have sprouted up almost as quickly as the black-eyed Susans and purple coneflowers that filled the planters in summer, and affluent young people are buying up condos and lofts as fast as the old buildings are renovated.

Wholesale grocer Larry Pienta notes approvingly that the city helps neighborhood businesses spruce up their facades, and that people are starting to spend money to make the neighborhood look nice.

But Pienta doesn’t like the way new flower planters make it impossible to see cross traffic, and he has little sympathy for new residents who complain about the noise of the delivery trucks or the smell of the butcher shops.

“When you buy something down here, you should buy it with your eyes wide open,” he says, standing by barrels of dried beans and herbs. “This is a market. There are going to be smells; there is going to be noise.”

Smells and noise notwithstanding, “Chicago is a very beautiful city,” says Harris, the professor. “When I have friends and family come from the East to see Chicago they’re always taken aback.”

But then, the city’s image as the home of Capone and Saul Bellow’s Augie March, hog butcher to the world and steelmaker for the nation--”Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders,” in the words of the poet Carl Sandburg--hasn’t reflected reality for years.

After all, Harris chuckles, “we haven’t had cattle killing here for a long time.”