For Cahan, the project had from the beginning seemed like an opportunity to freeze-frame America, and what better place to do that than in Chicago. Ordered and bedraggled. Excessive and austere. Familiar and foreign. An imperfect city, a city of quixotic quests and of reluctant resignation. A city that was, Algren once wrote, the product “of Man’s endless war against himself.” These are Chicago’s truths but they are also, after all, America’s truths, and they always have been.
I’ve heard it suggested that Chicago is passé. The steel mills have closed. Public housing is coming down. The mob has been dismantled. And, Chicago is no longer hog butcher to the world. Even the city’s one claim to edginess, Playboy magazine, has picked up shop and moved. “I love Chicago,” the magazine’s new editor who’s now based in New York told a reporter. “It’s my second favorite city.” The city, though, always finds a way to move on: Now, for example, with more than a hundred sweets manufacturers, it has become the world’s candy capital. (As I write, two large confectioners have announced their closing; it is, indeed, a city in motion.)
When Comer first considered his project, it was because he’d been struck by the vast physical changes here, but in the end, what he captured was a people—a people evolving, a people shifting and changing, a people finding their way. I asked Comer why he thought the photographs of Chicago had become such an attraction abroad. “Because,” he replied simply, “the place is real.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Tony Fitzpatrick, Kale Williams, Andrew Patner, Nancy Drew, Julie Aimen, Isabel Wilkerson, Rachel Reinwald, John Houston, Dan Kotlowitz, Melissa Fay Greene, Amy Dorn, and my wife’s family. A grateful nod to This American Life and The Atlantic, where I had told much of the Cicero story before, and to Chicago Public Radio, where I first told of meeting Milton Reed. Of course, with gratitude and for their patience: Ed Sadlowski, Millie Wortham, Brenda Stephenson, Milton Reed, Andrea Lyon, Bob Guinan, John Celikoski, and Dave Boyle.
Thanks to my friends Alice Truax, who, with her usual grace and exactness, nudged me when my storytelling was out of whack; Kevin Horan, who kept me from going off half-cocked; and Tim Samuelson, who kept me from getting it wrong. (Any errors, of course, are my own doing.) And to Studs Terkel, whose friendship and work has inspired.
To Doug Pepper, for asking—and for seeing it through with such care and good cheer. It’s a better book for it. And to David Black, my agent and good friend, for making it happen, as always.
Finally, to my father, Bob Kotlowitz, for all good things. And to my beloved wife, Maria, who keeps me real.
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by Michael Cunningham
After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival
by Edwidge Danticat
by William Murray
Washington Schlepped Here: Walking in the Nation’s Capital by Christopher Buckley
Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg
by James McPherson
Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon
by Chuck Palahniuk
Blues City: A Walk in Oakland by Ishmael Reed
Time and Tide: A Walk Through Nantucket
by Frank Conroy
Lost in My Own Backyard: A Walk in Yellowstone National Park by Tim Cahill
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alex Kotlowitz is the author of The Other Side of the River and There Are No Children Here, which the New York Public Library named as one of the most important books of the twentieth century. A former staff writer at the Wall Street Journal, his work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine and The New Yorker, as well as on This American Life and PBS. He has received the George Foster Peabody Award, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, and the George Polk Award. He is a writer-in-residence at Northwestern University and a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame.
The Other Side of the River
There Are No Children Here
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Donadio & Olson, Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from Chicago: City on the Make by Nelson Algren. Copyright © 1951 by Nelson Algren. Reprinted by permission of Donadio & Olson, Inc.
Copyright © 2004 by Alex Kotlowitz
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published by Crown Journeys, an imprint of Crown Publishers, New York, New York
Member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc.
www.crownpublishing.com
CROWN JOURNEYS and the Crown Journeys colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Title page photograph © Sandy Felsenthal/CORBIS
Map by Jackie Aher
Map source: City 2000
Kotlowitz, Alex.
Never a city so real: a walk in Chicago / Alex Kotlowitz.
1. Chicago (Ill.)—Social life and customs. 2. Chicago (Ill.)—Biography.
3. Chicago (Ill.)—Description and travel. I. Title.
F548.3.K68 2004
977.3′11–dc22 2004002860
eISBN: 978-1-4000-9750-0
v3.0