It will always be my kind of town

Whenever I mention to someone back home in Chicago how much I'd love to come back, they customarily ask, "Why?" I'm constantly told that the city has fallen on hard times, and that it's "just not the same."

I left Chicago in 1981, when I went to seminary. For a while, I visited as often as I could, chiefly at Christmas and Easter. As my visits gradually became less frequent, I began to notice change: the gentrification of the Loop area, for example, and a new Brown Line on the CTA's world-famous 'El.'

It's been many years since I've been home, not out of choice but purely because of practical reasons. My contact with my family members back there has been a great deal more sporadic than I'd like. But whenever I talk to one of them, or even to one of the very large number of other transplanted Chicagoans here in Des Moines, they tend to paint a dark picture of the city I love.

If I can ever afford to live in Chicago again, I want to, anyway. It's home. It's familiar places and people I'd like to be closer to. It's being able to turn on the TV on an autumn afternoon and get the Bears game, instead of the Kansas City Chiefs or the Minnesota Vikings. It's better access to Cubs and Blackhawks games on TV and radio- and the option of hopping on the 'El' and actually going to a game from time to time.

It's the Museum of Science and Industry, and that captured World War I German submarine. It's the Oriental Institute and the University of Chicago, whose campus I used to love to wander around on back in the late Cretaceous. It's the Shedd Aquarium and the Adler Planetarium and the Field Museum.

It's Concordia University Chicago (or 'Concordia River Forest,' as it will always be known to those of us who went there), my collegiate alma mater. And there are all the other matres that went before it: Wilbur Wright Junior College, relocated from the old building on Austin but still reminiscent of what, looking back, were the happiest days of my life; Luther High School South, a place I couldn't stand when I was there but have grown to appreciate as time has gone by; Grace Lutheran School, where I first memorized Luther's Small Catechism with the help of a wooden paddle; and Daniel J. Corkery School, where I went from Kindergarten through 4th Grade, and whose halls I want to walk one more time before I die, if I can ever find an excuse.

It's Chicago-style hotdogs and Italian beef, polish sausage and decent pizza (Iowa pizza- with a few exceptions- tends to taste like ketchup-covered cardboard). It's a place that's mine in a sense that Des Moines never could be.

I noted with interest, then, this article on "The Decline and Rise of Chicago," tracing the history of the city I was born and raised in over the course of several decades. I gather that it's part of a series from a man who is sounding a cautionary note concerning the city's current state in a number of areas.

I hope his warnings are heeded, and Chicago can resume it's rigthful place as the most American of America's great cities- American in a way neither New York nor Los Angeles ever can be. And I hope some day to be part of it again.

HT: Real Clear Policy