Scott Turow reflects on Chicago

“While Chicago has the title of Second City, because of the NATO summit we’ve shown the world that we are a world-class, first-class city,” boasted Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, once the gathering of North Atlantic Treaty Organization leaders was over in late May. The remark was prototypically Chicagoan: tinged with resentment of the doubters and sounding just a tad like someone trying to convince himself.

I have lived in Chicago almost all my life and like to say it is the most American of our nation’s big cities. In Manhattan, most residents don’t even own cars, which exiles them from a central chunk of our national experience. Los Angeles is a city of star-struck dreamers. Washington, D.C., is a company town fully marinated in politics. Chicago stands in the middle of America in every sense, its residents here for jobs and family, not dreams. The stockyards (where my grandfather worked as an immigrant) and the steel mills have given way to a service economy built around the corporate headquarters that cluster in proximity to O’Hare International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest, and the futures and options exchanges in the Loop, as Chicago’s downtown is called, because of the elevated tracks that circle overhead. Unlike some of the Midwest’s former manufacturing hubs—say Detroit or Cleveland—Chicago remains a city of thriving neighborhoods, due in no small part to the leadership of the former mayor, Richard M. Daley, who shored up the public schools and negotiated to keep jobs within the city in a relentless and successful effort to prevent the middle class from departing.
Read the full essay at Newsweek

Scott Turow is a novelist and lawyer. He is the author of Presumed Innocent and The Trial of the Gemini, due from Grand Central Publishing next year.