Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [1]
It has a future – Fortune magazine, in a recent study, prophesied the day will come when Chicago, already a vast commercial, industrial, and residential complex stretching over fifty miles along the sandy southwestern curve of Lake Michigan, will become a four-hundred-mile city, running from Detroit to Chicago to Milwaukee. The authors of the Fortune study, Edwin Darby of the Sun-Times and William Clark of the Tribune, summed up their article with these glowing words: “The Chicago of 1962 is as new as the city that emerged from a decade of furious construction after the fire of 1871 leveled 18,000 of the city’s buildings …. Celebrating the 125th anniversary of its founding this year [1962], Chicago is a city of constant and booming change and growth – a living city.” The man on the street, taking cognizance of the tremendous amount of building, perhaps summed it up more succinctly: “We’ll have a helluva city – once they finish it.”
It has crime – a syndicate so well publicized that a farm boy was once quoted as saying, “Goodbye, God, we’re going to Chicago.” Less publicized is the fact that it also has more theological institutions than any other city in the nation.
And some say it has the biggest line of ballyhoo anywhere, an accusation which stuck it with a nickname in 1893 during a squabble over a World’s Fair. “Don’t pay any attention to the nonsensical claims of that Windy City,” said New York editor Charles A. Dana. “It’s people couldn’t build a World’s Fair if they won it.” Editor Dana thereby initiated an intercity feud that has grown with the years. But the “Windy City” did build that World’s Fair, the Columbian Exposition of 1893. It built that, and much more.
It filled swamps with dirt from its South Side, jacked up streets, sidewalks, and buildings, and in sixty years did what Paris required six hundred and fifty to achieve – it passed the million mark in population. And as any recent visitor can testify, Chicago is still a boom town. In the past decade it has built more factories than any other city – by a margin of more than one and a half billion dollars in valuation. Its steel-making capacity now equals that of Britain and exceeds that of Asia’s workshop, Japan.
It is the world’s leading inland port, handling more traffic annually than the Panama Canal; it is the world’s leading rail terminal (22 lines moving 239,000 passengers a day); and the biggest air center (nearly one fourth of America’s passenger traffic). In the mail-order business (led by Sears, Roebuck and Company, Montgomery Ward, Spiegel, and Aldens), it accounts for more than nine tenths of all United States sales in the field.
Chicago boasts the world’s tallest hotel (the forty-two-story Morrison) and the largest (the 3,000-room Conrad Hilton); and the biggest commercial building (Merchandise Mart), convention hall (McCormick Place), indoor arena (Chicago Stadium), grain-trading pit (Board of Trade), produce market (South Water Street), and air terminal (O’Hare International Airport).
Its daily transportation activity includes more than 1,200 airplane landings and take-offs, 1,000 passenger train arrivals and departures, 32,000 freight car movements, and 28,000 truck loadings and unloadings. Nearly $2,500,000 in retail sales are rung up every working hour – some $40,000 a minute.
There is a birth every five and a half minutes and a marriage every twelve. More daily commuters – 865,000 – funnel into its business district than occupy the entire city of Dallas or Milwaukee or Washington, D.C. An average of 12,000 visitors attend the ten or more conventions and trade shows daily in progress.
Fabulous, ordinary, beautiful, ugly, progressive, backward, cultured, rough-edged, Chicago is a city I’d like you to know better.
I would like