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By Root 222 0

each defined by ethnicity, race, or class, each distinct from the other, some with straightforward designations like Ukrainian Village, Greektown, and Andersonville. A. J. Liebling, in a series of New Yorker pieces on the city in the 1950s, mistook this small-town quality for provincialism. He derisively referred to Chicago as “the Second City.” Contrary to popular perception (and Liebling’s claims) Chicagoans didn’t take offense. In fact, eight years later, the city’s premier comedy troupe—which spawned the likes of John Belushi, Joan Rivers, and Bill Murray—adopted the name, which has become a sort of rallying cry. One longtime newspaper columnist here recently said of Chicago’s “Second City” status, “We don’t give a fuck. We like it.” Chicagoans are also a succinct people.

For all of Chicago’s reputation as an insular place, it has, in fact, been molded if not defined by outsiders, people whose unconventionality flourished because there was no one to tell them to operate any other way. It’s why Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan changed the face of American architecture in Chicago and not in, say, Boston or New York. It’s why Montgomery Ward and Sears-Roebuck formed their catalogue companies here, transforming rural America. And it’s why Jane Addams, Ida B. Wells, and Saul Alinsky were able to raise hell, and in doing so push us to rethink the place of the dispossessed. It’s a city that doesn’t presume. It’s a democratic city. Expansive and exposed. There’s nothing false about it, no pretense. It is as you see it. Richard Wright, the author of Native Son, wrote that “it steals, helps, gives and cheats,” and does so with more zest than any other city in the world. (Wright also wrote that Chicago is “the known city,” suggesting that it had been examined and scrutinized, talked about and considered more than any other modern-day metropolis, which makes writing about it somewhat daunting.)

I’m an accidental Chicagoan. I grew up in New York, a city that thinks it’s the center of the universe, which it is. I never felt that I truly belonged to New York. It’s a place obsessed with status. Money. Beauty. Power. It’s how you’re measured there. Everybody, though, finds a place in Chicago. People are taken for who they are, not for what they have or haven’t achieved. This is, after all, a city first settled by people running from failure or pursuing a buck; it’s America’s original pioneer town. As historian Donald L. Miller points out in his book City of the Century, when Chicago was first settled in the early 1800s, it was a mud hole, a windswept prairie marsh so inhospitable that the Miami Indians chose to settle elsewhere. The original settlers were, writes Miller, “rogues and roustabouts.” Then the hundred-mile-long Illinois and Michigan Canal Corridor was completed in 1848, connecting Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River, and the city became the nation’s center of commerce, luring land and commodities speculators as well as builders of railroads, factories, and stockyards. Chicago soon became the destination for a cascade of immigrant groups, and in the twentieth century the terminus for African-Americans fleeing the South and for farm boys looking to earn a living butchering hogs or rolling steel.

I came here because as a journalist I thought it would be a good perch from which to peer into America’s heart, but I didn’t expect to find a home here. I expected to stay a year, maybe two. It’s been twenty, and counting.

The Italian sociologist Marco d’Eramo writes, “Chicago expresses the truth about the United States.” Which truths, then, have I chosen to include here? I’m going to admit right up front: This is a skewed and incomplete view of the city. I won’t pretend otherwise. When I told fellow Chicagoans what I was doing, they each had their notions about what should and shouldn’t be included, and they’d grumble and grouse. Inevitably, they’d say, “How can you write a book about Chicago, and not write about . . .?” Fill in the blank. Chicagoans are a possessive sort. They have set notions of how people ought to