From Wrigleyville to Logan Square

The second-to-last sentence of my last post, Mister Manners, may have given you the idea that I don't enjoy living in Chicago. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

In fact, when I met Patrick, I was one of those Chicago transplants who was still--five years after moving here--giddy-infatuated with our fair city. I did what most young(ish) people do when they move here: I got an apartment in Wrigleyville, bought a bicycle to ride by the lake, left my car parked on the street and rode the el to my job downtown. At the time it all was very exotic: City Life.

I'm a big fan of city life, probably because I grew up in the south, where big cities still are viewed with suspicion by a lot of folks who think it's weird that so many people would want to be in such close physical proximity to other people who don't look or act anything like them. And I always thought they were weird for wanting to live on giant pieces of land with so much space between them and other people who looked and acted exactly like them.

You can keep Los Angeles; San Francisco is beautiful; St. Louis is nondescript; and Miami is too humid. But more than once in my life, I thought I'd move to New York. I thought New York was my favorite city until I moved to Chicago.

Like most new residents, and all the tourists, I marveled at how clean Chicago is, how efficient it is, how it "works." And that is true much of the time ... if you're downtown, or near downtown. However, if you venture a little further west and north away from the tourists, you'll discover neighborhoods of people, residents who've lived in Chicago their entire lives.

And guess what? Everything is not shiny and clean. Lifetime residents of Chicago know that many things don't really "work" they way they're supposed to. Corruption in city government is rampant and--worse--incompetence is standard operating procedure. I have friends (also transplants) who defend this situation by way of explaining that corruption is a fact of life in every city government and incompetence is a way of life for some people. That may be true to a certain extent. But in Chicago, the corruption and the incompetence are in, your, face.

And this causes lifetime residents to view the rest of us ("blow-ins" is how Patrick refers to us) as a giant pain-in-the-ass. Lakefront liberals who are so damned impressed with the flower-boxes and wrought iron fences downtown that we enable and even promote the current corrupted condition by continuing to vote for the very people who are doing the corrupting. And after nine years here, I'm coming around to that line of thought.

I still love Chicago for all the reasons I loved it when I moved here nine years ago. The architecture. The lake. The neighborhoods. The food. The culture. The shopping. The attitude. The people. And I absolutely wouldn't want to live anywhere else. But my enthusiasm now is tempered by the fact that I'm a permanent resident, with a family to raise and property taxes to pay. I see things I didn't see before, when securing a parking space in Wrigleyville on game-days was my biggest concern.

To be continued. :-)