Chicago is a tale of two cities, headlines declare. This narrative has been gaining steam alongside reports of growing economic divisions and diverging outlooks on the future of the city. Yet to keen observers of the Second City, this is nothing new. Those who truly know Chicago know that for decades-even centuries-the city has been defined by duality, possibly since the Great Fire scorched a visible line between the rubble and the saved. For writers...

Arguably the most influential document in the history of American urban planning, Daniel Burnham's 1909 'Plan of Chicago' proposed many of the city's most distinctive features. This text reveals the Plan's central role in shaping the ways people have envisioned the cityscape and urban life itself.

"A close look at an urban neighborhood in Chicago, South Shore, and the author's own relationship to that neighborhood from living there as a child and studying it as an adult."--Provied by publisher.

R.J. Nelson, hired in 1987 to clean up rampant corruption on Chicago's waterfront, writes about his experiences, including the angry constituents, prying journalists, shell-shocked employees, and how he made it his personal mission to become a public servant who worked for the common good and followed the spirit-- if not always the letter-- of the law.

Our traditional image of Chicago-as a gritty metropolis carved into ethnically defined enclaves where the game of machine politics overshadows its ends-is such a powerful shaper of the city's identity that many of its closest observers fail to notice that a new Chicago has emerged over the past two decades. Larry Bennett here tackles some of our more commonly held ideas about the Windy City-inherited from such icons as Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg,...

Mary Barr thinks a lot about the old photograph hanging on her refrigerator door. In it, she and a dozen or so of her friends from the Chicago suburb of Evanston sit on a porch. It's 1974, the summer after they graduated from Nichols Middle School, and what strikes her immediately-aside from the Soul Train—era clothes-is the diversity of the group: boys and girls, black and white, in the variety of poses you'd expect from a bunch of friends on the...