U.S. City of the Year: Chicago

By: Alex KotlowitzFri May 9, 2008 at 5:09 PM

Chicago Sun Time: In front of Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate in Millennium Park | photo illustration by Peter Funch

Skyscrapers, green roofs, and house music -- a very American metropolis.

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

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Holmes now runs the Chicago Community Loan Fund, which does what he calls "opportunity finance" -- making low-interest loans for commercial development in low-income neighborhoods. It's the equivalent of a nonprofit poker player (a "rounder," as they were once called), willing to wager on what may at first not seem a winning hand. Chicago is the epicenter of social investing -- making the market work where it hasn't. It began with Shore Bank, the innovative lender that helped inspire Muhammad Yunus, who, with his Grameen Bank, was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.

Holmes's operation is small -- under $5 million in loans a year -- but it has had a terrific impact, including winning Illinois's first green-housing award for its investment in renovating a dilapidated brick apartment building in the Woodlawn neighborhood. The group has funded a building for artists, the restoration of tenements, and a soon-to-be retail center, all geared toward people who need a foot up. "When I think of Chicagoans," he told me, "I think of people who are straightforward, not pretentious, and fair on balance. You're smart, you work hard, you're decent, you're good -- we'll take you in."

Holmes showed up at Cuatro in a dark suit, having just come from a Lyric Opera performance of Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin. "I need a good drink," he told me, so we ordered beers. He then excused himself to say hello to the deejay, DJ FLX (real name: Felix Cuevas), who came to Chicago because you have to pass through the city if you're going to make it in house -- though it's now more popular in Europe and Japan.

House was pioneered here by the legendary deejay Frankie Knuckles, who, along with roughly 1,100 other Chicagoans, has a street named for him. (This city likes to honor its own.) Not unlike the blues before it, you can hear house in small venues around the city; and every July 4th weekend in Jackson Park (where Clarence Darrow's ashes were scattered), there's a picnic at which thousands spin and undulate to various deejays mixing their funk.

DJ FLX, just back from touring Morocco and Paris, began playing a set accompanied by the trumpeter Kafele. FLX's style is "deep house," a uniquely Chicago sound with a profoundly soulful, I-dare-you-to-sit-still pulse. As Holmes dances, he tells me he has a spot in the city that feels as spiritual to him as house music. It's an outcropping on Lake Michigan, just off 39th Street, an unusually quiet stretch of the 29-mile public lakefront. Holmes often walks out on this spit of land and admires the graceful yet muscular skyline, a mixture of old and new, works of art mingled with feats of engineering. "It's so radically vertical," he says. "Shooting up from the flat lake and flat land, it seems to point to the future." Indeed, the cityscape is constantly morphing; its newest marvel is the Chicago Spire, a 150-story corkscrew that's under construction. According to Calatrava, its architect, it's meant to resemble a plume of smoke rising from a campfire Native Americans would have built centuries ago on the banks of the Chicago River.

I soon realize that I too am dancing in place. Holmes doesn't notice. His body is under sail to the beat-driven winds of FLX's mixes, but his mind is still on the skyline and the 8-mile walks he often takes from his office to his home. The stroll takes him to the outcropping and through Bronzeville, a neighborhood once known, like New York's Harlem, as a center of black commerce and culture. Holmes has done some financing in that community, which is undergoing radical change, mixing old and new, including a Sullivan-designed church Tim Samuelson is helping to restore (on hands and knees, Samuelson collected more than a thousand shards of glass after a devastating fire so that the stained-glass windows could be replicated) as well as mixed-income developments rising where the world's largest stretch of public housing once stood. "In Chicago," Holmes says, "it's happening, right in front of your eyes."

Alex Kotlowitz is the author of Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago.

From Issue 126 | June 2008

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Recent Comments | 20 Total

May 21, 2008 at 7:53am by Mark Zorro

What gravitates me today is not delving into what people read, nor no longer trying to simply figure out why I personally write what it is I write, but what I am looking for are those articles that get me traveling and finding based on a writers experience rather than a laundry list of go to sites, this one hit the "bulls-eye" in that regard, which is quite apt if we are talking about Chicago. By the time I finished fishing this article, I found out that the neon-strip tunnel at O'Hare airport was designed by Helmat Jahn and that the BCE building I have often starred at in arched wonder is designed by Santiago Calatrava. This article took me to new sources of music such as Lupe Fiasco, Wilco and Neko Case. I actually loved the melodic tone of HOLD ON HOLD ON, a song featured on Neko Case's website. The most fascinating character mentioned in the piece is Studs Terkel, his site at studsterkel.org, which is chock full of interesting interviews. I found it interesting that Stanley Tigerman opened up an alternative design school called ARCHEWORKS. Beyond the architects and the musicians, I discovered how little I knew about trees and that itself opens up an interesting pathway of inquiry but what this article did most was to open my eyes up to see Chicago in a new light, to go beyond the beef and the politics and begin to notice a city that I have worked in but have never done the justice of taking the time to notice it or even try to "visit it". It is not so much that Hillary Clinton once did a thesis on Saul Alinksy because that takes me back into Chicago politics that I have learned not to trust, but this article connected me to an authenticity and realistic attitude of Chicago that I have utterly failed to connect with. So I am finding that the best stuff in a great article does not come to light until we shift the focus of our own attention makeup. This is more the reason why commentary simply sucks up my time and stops me from the real juice here, which is starting to look at my world in a new way and begin to extract rather than simply accumulate. The way Alex Kowlowitz wrote this up is very helpful in that regard. What Alex did here is open up a Chicago that I have been so lazy minded to see before, yet I know it is city that should command my attention as well as it turns out, my respect, but now thanks to this article, it does.......M.

U.S. City of the Year: Chicago

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