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“Big” is certainly the operative word around these parts.
    Nelson Algren’s classic Chicago: City on the Make is the late poet’s single-hearted vision of his town’s doubleness. “Chicago . . . forever keeps two faces, one for winners and one for losers; one for hustlers and one for squares . . . One face for Go-Getters and one for Go-Get-It-Yourselfers. One for poets and one for promoters . . . One for early risers, one for evening hiders.”
    It is the city of Jane Addams, settlement worker, and Al Capone, entrepreneur; of Clarence Darrow, lawyer, and Julius Hoffman, judge; of Louis Sullivan, architect, and Sam Insull, magnate; of John Altgeld, governor, and Paddy Bauler, alderman. (Paddy’s the one who some years ago observed, “Chicago ain’t ready for reform.” It is echoed in our day by other, less paunchy aldermen.)
    It is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. The battle appears to be forever
joined. The armies, ignorant and enlightened, clash by day as well as by night. Chicago is America’s dream, writ large. And flamboyantly.
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    PARADOX: Today’s council members opposing the younger Mayor Daley are more diffuse, less cohesive, of all color, affording the son of the old Buddha more power than his old man had.
    It has—as they used to whisper of the town’s fast women—a reputation.
    Elsewhere in the world, anywhere, name the city, name the country, Chicago evokes one image above all others. Sure, architects and those interested in such matters mention Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Mies van der Rohe. Hardly anyone in his right mind questions this city as the architectural Athens. Others, literary critics among them, mention Dreiser, Norris, Lardner, Algren, Farrell, Bellow, and the other Wright, Richard. Sure, Mencken did say something to the effect that there is no American literature worth mentioning that didn’t come out of the palatinate that is Chicago. Of course, a special kind of jazz and a blues, acoustic rural and electrified urban, have been called “Chicago style.” All this is indubitably true.
    Still others, for whom history has stood still since the Democratic convention of 1968, murmur: Mayor Daley. (As Chicago’s most perceptive chronicler, Mike Royko, pointed out, the name has become the eponym for “city chieftain”; thus, it is often one word, “mare-daley.”) The tone, in distant quarters as well as here, is usually one of awe; you may interpret it any way you please. “Who’s the mare-daley of your town?”
    Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders . . .

    Carl Sandburg, the white-haired old Swede with the wild cowlick, drawled out that brag in 1914. Today, he is regarded in more soft-spoken quarters as an old gaffer, out of fashion, more attuned to the street corner than the class in American studies. Unfortunately, there is some truth to the charge that his dug-out-of-the-mud city, sprung-out-of-the-fire-of-1871 Chicago, is no longer what it was when the Swede sang that song. It is no longer the slaughterhouse of the hang-from-the-hoof hogs. The stockyards have gone to feedlots in, say, Clovis, New Mexico, or Greeley, Colorado, or Lo-gansport, Indiana. It is no longer the railroad center, when there were at least seven awesome depots where a thousand passenger trains refueled themselves each day; and it is no longer, since the Great Depression of the 1930s, the stacker of wheat.
    During all these birth years of the twenty-first century, the unique landmarks of American cities have been replaced by Golden Arches, Red Lobsters, Pizza Huts, and Marriotts, so you can no longer tell one neon wilderness from another. As your plane lands, you no longer see old landmarks, old signatures. You have