Heaven -- for a hell of a lot less than I was spending on a much smaller apartment with no light on a street I had no interest in hanging out on. Slowly, I have come to embrace Chicago. It is NOT New York. To compare it would be unfair to either city. Chicago is its own beast, a city with a bit of a chip on its shoulder in truth, that second city moniker really having set into the psyche of many of its residents, if not its very soil and mortar. But it shouldn't ever feel inferior. It's so rich.
And so livable (despite the tragic violence of the south and west side). I can breathe in Chicago. I can partake in all of the things I was doing in New York -- art and foodie stuff and music and sports and literature and film and the ZOO. Right across the street. Nothing like sipping a latte, reading the Trib and the NY Times (old habits die hard) while watching the seals take their morning constitutional. New York is sometimes a fantasy, and to live that fantasy some of us tend to become a little delusional to rationalize our often lacking situations. That's from me. I know people my age, still struggling, who would never leave NYC. For any reason.
Being true to myself, I know I am not one of them. I am also not the artistic elite, master of Wall Street, anyone near the upper echelons of any professional endeavor (am I now sounding pathetic, I wonder?) who can simply live exactly how they want anywhere where they want for as long as they want. I'm just a working guy who likes city life.
Emphasis on LIFE. I can LIVE in Chicago. New York is the world.
Chicago though is the more American city. It wants to be more. A Paris in the Midwest, and it tries, and, in a charming way, at least to me, it always fails. Chicago is at its best when it embraces its Chicago-ness. It's tough. Gritty. But there is that lake. And a small town moment around any given urban corner.
Read more here.
He also publishes a cool report on the "tyranny of New York". NY, I love you.
New York City's role on the American scene isn't unhealthy merely because it attracts creative, ambitious people with its dynamism, or because its residents have a healthy ego about the relative merits of their city. The problem is that along with those inevitable traits of great cities, Manhattan and certain of its surrounding boroughs happen to dominate American media, finance, and letters so thoroughly that even the most impressive achievements of other cities are routinely ignored while New Yorkers talk about local matters of comparatively smaller consequence, either tempting or forcing the whole nation to eavesdrop on their chatter depending on the day.
In Houston, Phoenix, Dallas, San Diego, and San Antonio, all among the top ten most populous cities in the United States, the smallest with well over a million residents, the average person has watched countless hours of television set in various New York City apartments, and perhaps never seen their own city portrayed in a sitcom. The executives read The Wall Street Journal far more carefully than the local newspaper, the aspiring writers dream of getting a short story published in The New Yorker, the local Starbucks sells The New York Times, the romantics watch Breakfast at Tiffany's on AMC at six month intervals, and every New Years Eve people gather around to watch a tape-delayed broadcast of a ball that dropped on Times Square hours earlier.
New York is a great city, but in America today, someone who seeks out the best television or novels or magazine writing or art or newspaper reporting is confronted with an even greater degree of NYC centric stuff than is justified. The city is a legitimate giant, yet its shadow somehow reaches much farther than it should. It thereby deprives other cities of the light they need to grow half as tall.
Read more here.
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