U.S. City of the Year: Chicago

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Feast on This: Historian Tim Samuelson lunches at the Carson Pirie Scott building. | photograph by Saverio Truglia

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In the bottom of the ninth inning of the 2005 World Series, as the long-suffering Chicago White Sox were about to win their first championship in 88 years, play-by-play announcer Joe Buck waxed eloquent about Chicago's South Side, where the Sox play. He described it as "a collection of neighborhoods...Irish neighborhoods. Italian neighborhoods. Polish. Lithuanian. Firemen. Policemen. Schoolteachers. Stockyard workers." Stockyard workers? The last stockyard closed in 1971. Irish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian? The South Side has long been predominantly African-American, and most of its immigrants now are Mexican. Yet that is how many view the city, through a lens dominated by the past. If you travel abroad and tell people you're from Chicago, they'll often pull their hands out of imaginary holsters and start shooting. To them, the city is still Al Capone's town, which it was -- nearly a century ago.

The real Chicago isn't so easy to keep up with. It's constantly reinventing itself. Jumpy. Agitated. Impatient. It's as if the place is trembling. Move aside. Don't linger. And if you're going to dawdle, get out of the way. But what any Chicagoan will also tell you is that the past is very much present. It doesn't go away. It shouldn't. In fact, that's Chicago's lure and its beauty: its ability to take what was and figure out what could be.

Consider Millennium Park. The city's spectacular growth in the late 19th century was in large part because of the railroads. Chicago, centrally located, could ship anywhere and receive anything. But 100 years later, the railroads here had become near relics; the dozens of Illinois Central Railroad tracks that converged downtown, an eyesore. So what did Chicago do? It covered some 25 acres of tracks and commuter lines with a massive platform, one so sturdy that it could build a park on it. It made the park's centerpiece a band shell, designed by Frank Gehry, that feels simultaneously whimsical (it resembles a tangled ribbon tossed by the Lake Michigan breeze) and brawny (that ribbon is made of steel, a call to the city's past as a center of industrial might). Some 100 years ago, Daniel Burnham, who oversaw the construction of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and drew a layout for the city that included putting everyone within walking distance of a park, declared, "Make no little plans."

And so Chicago does not. FAST COMPANY has named it U.S. City of the Year, recognizing not its past but its present -- and its future -- as a place where there's room to stretch. Chicago has given America social investing and the stories of Stuart Dybek and Aleksander Hemon. It has been greening itself since long before it became trendy, and it has been dancing, too -- this is the home of house music, Wilco, and Lupe Fiasco. Here, in the birthplace of the American skyscraper, Santiago Calatrava is redefining the form with his Spire, while at the Art Institute, Renzo Piano is building a $300 million addition. The economy is growing faster than New York's or L.A.'s. And one of Chicago's own, who arrived in the 1980s and, in the tradition of the great rabble-rouser Saul Alinsky, took a job community organizing, has made a shockingly viable run for president, despite everyone telling him he was too inexperienced. Early in his campaign, Barack Obama told supporters, "I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I'm tough. I'm from Chicago."

Aware of all the writers who have come before -- Carl Sandburg, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel -- I have no pretensions of having the last word on Chicago. Nor can I hope to capture in such a short space the contradictions of this place. Wright, who launched his career here, once wrote, "There is an open and raw beauty about that city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life." I've written plenty on the former and so here want to dwell on the latter. Every time I set forth in this scrappy place, I'm reminded why, despite my roots as a New Yorker, I've chosen Chicago as home: Alongside the failed and the fragile, it's a city of romance and optimism.

The people, of course, give a place its soul. So I visited with several Chicagoans who personify this city. They took me places that seemed at once to stay in place and move forward. Chicago is, after all, ever in motion, pulling from the past while pushing at the future.

Not long ago, a delegation from the International Olympic Committee was being bused around town, and its guide, Tim Samuelson, the city's cultural historian and resident Boswell, sensed ennui. Or maybe it was skepticism. Regardless, given that Chicago is the U.S. nominee to host the 2016 Games, that was no good thing, especially to Samuelson, a hoarder of city artifacts -- from smoke-stained ceiling pieces from the 708 Club, the premier blues joint of the 1940s, to Eliot Ness's handcuffs -- who once told me, "My whole existence is Chicago."