The bully gets some class

A quarter century ago, Chicago had a tough rep.
Now the city is planted in posies and rapped in wrought iron.
And Chicagoans are downright cosmopolitan.
what's happened to that toddlin' town?

Essay by Robert Davis

Chicago in 1974 was a bully kind of town. There was no doubt about that.

Mayor Richard J. Daley, first elected chief executive in 1955, coupled that job with the chairmanship of the legendary Democratic Party Machine, establishing a Big City power unrivaled in the United States. The city reflected that image in its streets, its reputation and its behavior.

Nationally, Daley achieved the bully tag in 1968 during the riots in Chicago after the death of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and when the Democratic National Convention, a flash- point of the 1960s, erupted into street clashes between police and demonstrators. It was not a particularly flattering reputation elsewhere, but in Chicago Daley was revered for his actions and re-elected by resounding margins in 1971 and 1975.

By 1974, Chicago, as epitomized by Daley, was a tough industrial Midwestern city that had little patience for dissent, a basic no-nonsense approach to development, and a social and cultural life marked more by beer and hot dogs than zinfandel and brie. Chicago in 1974 was known as an American city, but not as a world-class metropolis. Chicagoans seemed to like it that way.

Twenty-five years later, in a quarter century bookended by Mayors Daley but characterized by some of the most sweeping changes experienced by any city in the country, Chicago is a new kind of town, and, as the millennium approaches, the state's biggest city promises to keep going in that direction.

Two and a half decades ago, Chicago was Daley and Al Capone. Today, it's still Daley, but also Oprah and Michael Jordan. In 1974, while no longer Carl Sandburg's Hog Butcher to the World, Chicago still was known as a rough town where smokestack industries and big labor ruled. Today, the workers mostly wear white collars. And the stockyard cows of the past are represented by colorful plastic bovines, hundreds of them, standing placidly on city street corners in downtown Chicago, part of the Cows on Parade public art celebration that made Chicago — for the summer of 1999, at least — the Whimsy Capital of America. This in a town where the original Mayor Daley virtually banned filmmakers from using Chicago as a set because he didn't like the images they were presenting.

Visitors can still get a deep dish pizza or a monstrously garnished hot dog in Chicago, but they can also visit one of Rich Melman's trendy theme-based Lettuce Entertain You restaurants or dine on chef Wolfgang Puck's fare at O'Hare International Airport. Performing arts are represented by the world-acclaimed Steppenwolf Theatre company and the Goodman Theatre, an offshoot of the internationally acclaimed Art Institute of Chicago.

New buildings are rising in downtown Chicago, after a lull in real estate development nationwide, and neighborhoods once considered too dangerous to visit are now too expensive to consider. The Near West Side, which, in 1967 and 1968, was virtually leveled by arsonists and rioters, leaving an expanse of vacant lots and burned-out buildings, has risen like the mythical phoenix from the ashes, with high rises and pricey lofts sprouting around a sparkling United Center.

And then there's the wrought iron.

Daley, who for years has been known as a tree lover, in recent years has become known as a wrought iron lover, as well, ordering his development staff to urge builders to install black wrought iron fencing around townhouses, businesses, even parking lots. In an orgy of capital spending just before the 1996 Democratic National Convention, arterial streets erupted with flower-filled median strips. Cul-de-sacs popped up all over Chicago, a city that has prided itself on a sensible north-south, east-

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Politically, Daley wants to stay out of it. Unlike his father, who likened good politics to good government, this Daley maintains he's the chief executive of a nearly $5 billion corporation and not a political boss. He tosses out political endorsements reluctantly and unenthusiastically, and his easy re-election bids have been dry recitations of progress, not stem-winding political sorties.

In the period between father and son, Chicago got its first woman mayor (Jane By me), its first two black mayors (Harold Washington and Eugene Sawyer) and even its first Croatian mayor (Michael Bilandic). But when these mayors finished their terms (in all cases, involuntarily), Chicagoans seemed to get that out of their system, returning to the brand name many had known since childhood.

It's unlikely there will be a brand change soon. With no noticeable threat on the horizon as the calendar turns to the year 2000, it seems the only person who can get Daley out of the mayor's office is Daley himself, who turned 57 this year.

So, with this mayor likely to stay in power, it's just as likely Chicago will continue to develop a more cosmopolitan worldview. In a quest to make Chicago a "world-class" city, Jane Byrne sought and won approval to stage a World's Fair in Chicago in 1992 — though her successor, Harold Washington, dumped that idea. But Richard Daley sought and won the right to hold World Cup Soccer matches in Chicago a couple years later, and took what many consider to be a major step toward letting the world see that Chicago was more than Capone.

With a booming economy in the city and its suburbs; with people flocking to move into expensive housing in such unlikely places as the South Loop and the Near West Side; with such shameful public housing developments as the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini- Green slowly but inexorably falling to the wrecking ball, Chicago enters the next millennium after a dazzling quarter century of mind-boggling change. White families or younger couples still planning their futures are staying or returning to the city, apparently convinced the once-infamous Chicago Public School system has been rehabilitated and is once again a viable alternative to the private or parochial schools that served as a refuge for decades.

The long-suffering residents of the concentrated Chicago Housing Authority developments are gradually dispersing into the city's neighborhoods and even the suburbs, moving to more livable newly built low-rise public developments or using rental certificates to find private housing. Scattered site housing, the feared concept that produced the public housing projects in the 1950s and 1960s, is slowly becoming a reality in Chicago, pushed by Richard M. Daley as strenuously as his father pushed the high rises.

In a recent CNN profile, Daley the Younger scoffed at the notion that he's acting like a Republican with his courtship of big business and the affluent. Instead, he noted, he's a sensible everyday kind of guy living in the present, meeting current problems head-on without relying on think tank studies and projections of life 20 years down the road.

And, it seems, Chicagoans, the younger breed as well as what remains of the older, are taking to the new city. Unemployment is low, buildings are rising, long-dormant neighborhoods are flowering. Even voices of dissent about such matters as police brutality seem muted as the crime rate dwindles.

Not everything has changed, of course. Twenty-five years later, the Cubs, the White Sox, the Blackhawks, the Bulls and the Bears are still losing.

And Daley is still the mayor. 

Robert Davis, former assistant metropolitan editor at the Chicago Tribune, covered Chicago city government and politics for more than 32 years at the Tribune before his retirement in June. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Illinois Issues October 1999 / 29