Downtown Chicago Quotes

There have been times I have thought some dreams should never be dreamt, but I would hate a world where that was true.

That weekend the city blushed with a great heat wave but on Monday it rained, cooling the ache in the street’s burn.

I don’t think I’ve ever referred to any girl I dated as my girlfriend. I think that would freak me out. Even the girl that I dated for two years in college I don’t think I ever referred to her as my girlfriend.” “How would you introduce her?” I asked. “I’m just going to say her name,” he said.

One of the professors told me last week that he feels bad teaching with the way the economy is now. ‘What’s the point?’ he said. ‘Kids aren’t getting jobs.’ You never hear faculty talk that way. He did.

Look, girls know when they’re cute,” he said. “You don’t have to tell them. All they need to do is look in the mirror. I have one friend out in New York, an attorney. She moved out there after the school year to take the bar. She doesn’t have a job. I was like, ‘How are you going to get a job there in this market?’ And she’s like, ‘I’ll wink and I’ll smile.’ She’s a pretty girl. Whether that works despite her poor grades is yet to be seen.

That church . . . it reminds me of one in downtown Chicago. Do you remember? That beautiful one with the courtyard near the Drake." Jeremy took a newspaper from a stack behind him and sat across from me. "I know the one you're talking about, but that church," he gestured out the window, "is older than America." I sighed. "Of course it is. Did I really just try to compare British and American architecture? How insensitive of me.

Really, nobody was there?” I asked. “Well, nobody important,” he said, putting his glasses back on and blinking.

I’ve officially turned into a loser,” she whispered cynically. “I’m looking forward to going home and having cereal for dinner and walking Mitchell and studying a little and then going to sleep. I’ve had my ‘going out and having fun’ quota for the year, I guess, and it’s June.

Beyond a certain speed, motorized vehicles create remoteness which they alone can shrink. They create distances for all and shrink them for only a few. A new dirt road through the wilderness brings the city within view, but not within reach, of most Brazilian subsistence farmers. The new expressway expands Chicago, but it sucks those who are well-wheeled away from a downtown that decays into a ghetto.

I remember when I was twenty-five,” he said. “No client comes to you when you’re twenty-five. It’s like when you are looking for a doctor. You don’t want the new one that just graduated. You don’t want the very old one, the one shaking, the one twenty years past his prime. You want the seasoned one who has done it so many times he can do it in his sleep though. Same thing with attorneys.

The stars glittered in the sky and as the number of people at the party grew there were merging conversations and laughter and bodies moving in outlines around the kegs of beer in a curtsy of youth.

The Chicago Sun-Times is a national leader in two areas: 1) Denying that racial mob violence exists, and 2) Explaining why it does. When a mob of five hundred people stormed through downtown Chicago, beating and threatening and destroying property, do you know what the excuse was? 1) Warm weather

Don’t you think most of those kids think too much about who got an A or a B when they were in law school and what that means to an inflated G.P.A. and not enough about the world?” asked Connor irrelevantly.

Do you want to achieve something or do you just want to make money?” asked a nearby man in a white shirt to another man in a striped shirt. I waited for the answer as I slowly walked past them. “Why is it an either or question?” the man in the striped shirt finally murmured philosophically under a sip of beer. They both stood there looking at each other in thought.

You meet a wizard in downtown Chicago. The wizard tells you he can make you more attractive if you pay him money. When you ask how this process works, the wizard points to a random person on the street. You look at this random stranger. The wizard says, "I will now make them a dollar more attractive." He waves his magic wand. Ostensibly, this person does not change at all; as far you can tell, nothing is different. But - somehow - this person is suddenly more appealing. The tangible difference is invisible to the naked eye, but you can't deny that this person is vaguely sexier. This wizard has a weird rule, though - you can only pay him once. You can't keep giving him money until you're satisfied. You can only pay him one lump sum up front. How much cash do you give the wizard?

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

He’d never answered the text from his brother last night because he was otherwise occupied getting a gorgeous stranger off on an open-air balcony in the middle of downtown Chicago. You couldn’t make this shit up. Penthouse, check your mail.

Out the window in the distance, contradicting the prairie, a mirage of downtown Chicago ascended to a kind of lurid acropolis, its light as if from nightly immolation warped to the red end of the spectrum, smoldering as if always just about to explode into open flames.

Should I have a doughnut or my disgusting cardboard?” asked Gwynn, as she drew up languidly before me at a study table in a bookstore on State Street, raising a puffed rice cake in the air. My eyes narrowed attentively at her face, but as I hesitated, she announced eagerly, “Disgusting cardboard it is!

You know, sometimes I think this is just not it,” he said, his glasses flashing from the early night’s light. He turned toward me in a thoughtful pause. “You know what I mean, Tom?” he asked. “It’s just not.

It was a generation growing in its disillusionment about the deepening recession and the backroom handshakes and greedy deals for private little pots of gold that created the largest financial meltdown since the Great Depression. As heirs to the throne, we all knew, of course, how bad the economy was, and our dreams, the ones we were told were all right to dream, were teetering gradually toward disintegration. However, on that night, everyone seemed physically at ease and exempt from life’s worries with final exams over and bar class a distant dream with a week before the first lecture, and as I looked around at the jubilant faces and loud voices, if you listened carefully enough you could almost hear the culmination of three years in the breath of the night gasp in an exultant sigh as if to say, “Law school was over at last!

In the 1880s Chicago was experiencing explosive growth that propelled land values to levels no one could have imagined, especially within the downtown “Loop,” named for the turn-around loops of streetcar lines.

Aided by the young George Pullman, who would later make a fortune building railway cars, Chesbrough launched one of the most ambitious engineering projects of the nineteenth century. Building by building, Chicago was lifted by an army of men with jackscrews. As the jackscrews raised the buildings inch by inch, workmen would dig holes under the building foundations and install thick timbers to support them, while masons scrambled to build a new footing under the structure. Sewer lines were inserted beneath buildings with main lines running down the center of streets, which were then buried in landfill that had been dredged out of the Chicago River, raising the entire city almost ten feet on average. Tourists walking around downtown Chicago today regularly marvel at the engineering prowess on display in the city’s spectacular skyline; what they don’t realize is that the ground beneath their feet is also the product of brilliant engineering.

Shortly before school started, I moved into a studio apartment on a quiet street near the bustle of the downtown in one of the most self-conscious bends of the world. The “Gold Coast” was a neighborhood that stretched five blocks along the lake in a sliver of land just south of Lincoln Park and north of River North. The streets were like fine necklaces and strung together were the brownstone houses and tall condominiums and tiny mansions like pearls, and when the day broke and the sun faded away, their lights burned like jewels shining gaudily in the night. The world’s most elegant bazaar, Michigan Avenue, jutted out from its eastern tip near The Drake Hotel and the timeless blue-green waters of Lake Michigan pressed its shores. The fractious make-up of the people that inhabited it, the flat squareness of its parks and the hint of the lake at the ends of its tree-lined streets squeezed together a domesticated cesspool of age and wealth and standing. It was a place one could readily dress up for an expensive dinner at one of the fashionable restaurants or have a drink miles high in the lounge of the looming John Hancock Building and five minutes later be out walking on the beach with pants cuffed and feet in the cool water at the lake’s edge.

In the 1880s Chicago was experiencing explosive growth that propelled land values to levels no one could have imagined, especially within the downtown “Loop,” named for the turn-around loops of streetcar lines. As land values rose, landowners sought ways of improving the return on their investments. The sky beckoned. The most fundamental obstacle to height was man’s capacity to walk stairs, especially after the kinds of meals men ate in the nineteenth century, but this obstacle had been removed by the advent of the elevator

This is so funny,” said Ellen, noticing the seating arrangement. “Isn’t this funny? Tom, come sit next to Robin. Griffin, sit next to Laura.” I stood up and sat next to Robin while Griffin brought his chair over to Laura. “That’s better,” said Ellen. “Isn’t that better?

One night the three of us were out on the town. Bill was driving us to an Italian restaurant. I had been on my new job just a few weeks. I was in the backseat and Bill was watching me in the rearview mirror. Bill said to me, “We heard from Jimmy that you paint houses.” I didn’t say anything. I just nodded my head “yes.” Okay, here it is, I thought. So much for getting away from the downtown culture and getting into a new line of work. “We got something in Chicago that needs to be straightened out. We got a friend there named Joey Glimco. He runs the cab local there, 777. He’s got the trucks on the waterfront, too. Ever heard of him?” I

The Second City Cop is a blog for and by Chicago police officers. After a recent violent weekend featuring three attacks of black mobs in the 018 beat, the downtown area, the blog reported: And for the record, the “three” “muggings” that are being “investigated?” Add a zero to that for incidents occurring last night in 018. Crime is down and if no one reports it or the media doesn’t get a hold of it? It never happened.12 Crime is down. But the number of unreported crimes is up. Go figure.

The Council Wars era from 1983 to 1986 and the brief months from 1986 to 1987 when Mayor Washington gained control over the council were among the most dramatic periods in Chicago's history. Blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women, and homosexuals gained real power at City Hall for the first time. Opposition to Reaganomics and support for the city as a nuclear weapons-free zone were led by the mayor and his department heads, not just opposition groups. The growth machine of the old Chicago regime, which favored urban growth focused on major public works projects and development in the downtown Loop area, was replaced by a balanced program of neighborhood, as well as downtown, economic development.33

It’s too late now. The game’s been won by companies who don’t give two shits about community character or decent jobs. Congratufuckinglations, America! We did the deal. Now we’ve got an unlimited supply of cheap commodities and unhealthy food and crumbling downtowns, no sense of place, and a permanent under class. Yay. The underclass isn’t relegated to urban ghettos either. It’s coast to coast and especially in between. Take US 50 west from Kansas City to Sacramento or US 6 from Chicago to California and you’ll see a couple thousand miles of corn, soybeans, and terminally ill towns. It looks like a scene from The Walking Dead. If there’s such a thing as the American Heartland, it has a stake through it.

Herman and I have been doing a lot of talking about the cake the past couple of days, and we think we have a good plan for the three tiers. The bottom tier will be the chocolate tier and incorporate the dacquoise component, since that will all provide a good strong structural base. We are doing an homage to the Frango mint, that classic Chicago chocolate that was originally produced at the Marshall Field's department store downtown. We're going to make a deep rich chocolate cake, which will be soaked in fresh-mint simple syrup. The dacquoise will be cocoa based with ground almonds for structure, and will be sandwiched between two layers of a bittersweet chocolate mint ganache, and the whole tier will be enrobed in a mint buttercream. The second tier is an homage to Margie's Candies, an iconic local ice cream parlor famous for its massive sundaes, especially their banana splits. It will be one layer of vanilla cake and one of banana cake, smeared with a thin layer of caramelized pineapple jam and filled with fresh strawberry mousse. We'll cover it in chocolate ganache and then in sweet cream buttercream that will have chopped Luxardo cherries in it for the maraschino-cherry-on-top element. The final layer will be a nod to our own neighborhood, pulling from the traditional flavors that make up classical Jewish baking. The cake will be a walnut cake with hints of cinnamon, and we will do a soaking syrup infused with a little bit of sweet sherry. A thin layer of the thick poppy seed filling we use in our rugelach and hamantaschen, and then a layer of honey-roasted whole apricots and vanilla pastry cream. This will get covered in vanilla buttercream.

One cannot examine the actions of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963, without concluding that the Service stood down on protecting President Kennedy. Indeed, the 120-degree turn into Dealey Plaza violates Secret Service procedures, because it required the presidential limousine to come to a virtual stop. The reduction of the president’s motorcycle escort from six police motorcycles to two and the order for those two officers to ride behind the presidential limousine also violates standard Secret Service procedure. The failure to empty and secure the tall buildings on either side of the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza likewise violates formal procedure, as does the lack of any agents dispersed through the crowd gathered in Dealey Plaza. Readers who are interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Secret Service’s multiple failures and the conspicuous violation of longstanding Secret Service policies regarding the movement and protection of the president on November 22, 1963, should read Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect. The difference in JFK Secret Service protection and its adherence to the services standard required procedures in Chicago and Miami would be starkly different from the arrangements for Dallas. Palamara established that Agent Emory Roberts worked overtime to help both orchestrate the assassination and cover up the unusual actions of the Secret Service in the aftermath. Roberts was commander of the follow-up car trailing the presidential limousine. Roberts covered up the escapades of his fellow secret servicemen at The Cellar, a club in downtown Ft. Worth, where agents, some directly responsible for the safety of President Kennedy during the motorcade, drank until dawn on November 22. He also ordered a perplexed agent Donald Lawton off the back of the presidential limousine while at Love Field, thus giving the assassins clearer, more direct shots and more time to get them off. Also, although Roberts recognized rifle fire being discharged in Dealey Plaza, he neglected to mobilize any of the agents under his watch to act. To mask the inactivity of his agents, Roberts, in sworn testimony, falsely increased the speed of the cars (from 9–11 mph to 20–25 mph) and the distance between them (from five feet to 20–25 feet).85 No analysis of the Secret Service’s actions on the day of the assassination can be complete without mentioning that Secret Service director James Rowley was a former FBI agent and close ally of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as a crony of Lyndon Johnson. Hoover was one of Johnson’s closest associates. The FBI Director would take the unusual step of flying to Dallas for a victory celebration in 1948 when Johnson illegally stole his Senate seat through election fraud. Johnson and Hoover were neighbors in the Foxhall Road area of the District of Columbia. Hoover’s budget would virtually triple during the years LBJ dominated the appropriations process as Senate Majority Leader. Rowley was a protégé of the director and one of the few men who left the FBI on good terms with Hoover. Rowley’s first public service job in the Roosevelt administration was arranged for him by LBJ. The neglect of assigning even one Secret Service agent to secure Dealey Plaza, as well as cleaning blood and other relatable pieces of evidence from the presidential limousine immediately following the assassination, seizing Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital to prevent a proper, well-documented autopsy, failing to record Oswald’s interrogation—all were important pieces of the assassination deftly executed by Rowley.

The reason women are more likely to have to transfer is because, like most cities around the world, London’s public transport system is radial.29 What this means is that a single ‘downtown’ area has been identified and the majority of routes lead there. There will be some circular routes, concentrated in the centre. The whole thing looks rather like a spider’s web, and it is incredibly useful for commuters, who just want to get in and out of the centre of town. It is, however, less useful for everything else. And this useful/not so useful binary falls rather neatly onto the male/female binary. But while solutions like London’s hopper fare are an improvement, they are by no means standard practice worldwide. In the US, while some cities have abandoned charging for transfers (LA stopped doing this in 2014), others are sticking with it.30 Chicago for example, still charges for public transport connections.31 These charges seem particularly egregious in light of a 2016 study which revealed quite how much Chicago’s transport system is biased against typical female travel patterns.32 The study, which compared Uberpool (the car-sharing version of the popular taxi app) with public transport in Chicago, revealed that for trips downtown, the difference in time between Uberpool and public transport was negligible – around six minutes on average. But for trips between neighbourhoods, i.e. the type of travel women are likely to be making for informal work or care-giving responsibilities, Uberpool took twenty-eight minutes to make a trip that took forty-seven minutes on public transport.

The year was 1967. The nation lived with this constant low-level anxiety about nuclear war. Some researchers had decided to study how people would actually respond during a nuclear attack. Right there in downtown Chicago, they’d built a nuclear fallout shelter and asked for volunteers. For some reason Carter’s mother had thought it a good idea to raise her hand, and so without Carter’s fully understanding why, he and his parents and his five siblings were taken to the shelter. “There’s barely enough room for four hundred people,” he recalled. “There’s concrete floors with no pillows or blankets. To eat, you had crackers, plus water that tasted like bleach. There’s one light that’s powered by a bike, so someone has to ride the bike to keep the light on. But the bike also can power a fan, so you had to choose between the light and the fan. It’s hot as hell.” The only creature comfort allowed was cigarettes. So the whole place filled with smoke. There Carter and his family remained for three days. The researchers stepped around them, taking notes. “They wanted to watch how people would behave,” said Carter. “So I got to watch, too.” What he realized, as he watched, was that there was no way a nuclear war would be anything like that. “My mom would be at home, and we’d be at school, and my dad would be at work,” he said. “We’d all be separated. We wouldn’t know how to get to the shelter, and that’s not where we’d go anyway.” His mind unspooled a different scenario that left him with a conviction that nuclear fallout shelters were probably a dumb idea. “Going through that experience forever changed my vision of these events.

This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time. Maybe it stops you from swerving, from ever even considering a swerve, because what you risk losing in terms of other people’s high regard can feel too costly. Maybe you spend three years in Massachusetts, studying constitutional law and discussing the relative merits of exclusionary vertical agreements in antitrust cases. For some, this might be truly interesting, but for you it is not. Maybe during those three years you make friends you’ll love and respect forever, people who seem genuinely called to the bloodless intricacies of the law, but you yourself are not called. Your passion stays low, yet under no circumstance will you underperform. You live, as you always have, by the code of effort/result, and with it you keep achieving until you think you know the answers to all the questions—including the most important one. Am I good enough? Yes, in fact I am. What happens next is that the rewards get real. You reach for the next rung of the ladder, and this time it’s a job with a salary in the Chicago offices of a high-end law firm called Sidley & Austin. You’re back where you started, in the city where you were born, only now you go to work on the forty-seventh floor in a downtown building with a wide plaza and a sculpture out front. You used to pass by it as a South Side kid riding the bus to high school, peering mutely out the window at the people who strode like titans to their jobs. Now you’re one of them. You’ve worked yourself out of that bus and across the plaza and onto an upward-moving elevator so silent it seems to glide. You’ve joined the tribe. At the age of twenty-five, you have an assistant. You make more money than your parents ever have. Your co-workers are polite, educated, and mostly white. You wear an Armani suit and sign up for a subscription wine service. You make monthly payments on your law school loans and go to step aerobics after work. Because you can, you buy yourself a Saab. Is there anything to question? It doesn’t seem that way. You’re a lawyer now. You’ve taken everything ever given to you—the love of your parents, the faith of your teachers, the music from Southside and Robbie, the meals from Aunt Sis, the vocabulary words drilled into you by Dandy—and converted it to this. You’ve climbed the mountain. And part of your job, aside from parsing abstract intellectual property issues for big corporations, is to help cultivate the next set of young lawyers being courted by the firm. A senior partner asks if you’ll mentor an incoming summer associate, and the answer is easy: Of course you will. You have yet to understand the altering force of a simple yes. You don’t know that when a memo arrives to confirm the assignment, some deep and unseen fault line in your life has begun to tremble, that some hold is already starting to slip. Next to your name is another name, that of some hotshot law student who’s busy climbing his own ladder. Like you, he’s black and from Harvard. Other than that, you know nothing—just the name, and it’s an odd one. Barack.

Time spent in nature can even relieve the symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). A pair of researchers at the University of Illinois, Andrea Faber Taylor and Ming Kuo, were intrigued by reports from parents that their ADHD-affected children seemed to function better after exposure to nature. Putting this possibility to an empirical test, they had children aged seven to twelve take a supervised walk in a park, in a residential neighborhood, or in a busy area of downtown Chicago. Following the walks, the youngsters who’d spent time in the park were better able to focus than the children in the other two groups—so much so, in fact, that on a test of their ability to concentrate, they scored like typical kids without ADHD. Indeed, Taylor and Kuo point out, a twenty-minute walk in a park improved children’s concentration and impulse control as much as a dose of an ADHD drug like Ritalin.

It had hurt my feelings, this intentional distance. I could feel him growing up and away. At least, that’s what I thought was happening. Years later, I’d learn that he had been dealing with violent attacks from the gang in an attempt to get him to join them, and that going downtown to see Chicago landmarks was the last thing on his mind.

...Marshall Field's Department Store....I spent - in more ways than one - the afternoon shipping in the vast and famous old store downtown....And then I had them mail a catalog home, too, jus tin case I'd missed something.

Westwood introduced himself and asked who he was talking to. The kid gave a name, no hesitation at all, but said she had never called the LA Times, and knew no private detectives. Westwood asked her if the phone they were on was used by other people, and she said yes, by all the volunteers. She said she was one of them. She said the volunteer room was where they left their coats and took their breaks. There was a phone in there, and time to use it, occasionally. She said the Lincoln Park library was a little ways north of downtown Chicago, and it had dozens of volunteers, always changing, young and old, men and women, all of them fascinating. But no, none of them seemed to be obsessed about anything scientific. Not overtly. Certainly not to the extent of calling distant newspapers. Westwood

In 1951, thousands of whites in Cicero, 20 minutes or so west of downtown Chicago, attacked an apartment building that housed a single black family, throwing bricks and firebombs through the windows and setting the apartment on fire. A Cook County grand jury declined to charge the rioters—and instead indicted the family’s NAACP attorney, the apartment’s white owner, and the owner’s attorney and rental agent, charging them with conspiring to lower property values.