"I don’t recognize my own neighborhood," said writer Studs Terkel,
one of Chicago’s most distinctive literary voices for decades. He lives
on the North Side.Tourists can take an elevator to the top of the Sears Tower, but it
takes a car to get to the company’s headquarters, which moved to the
suburbs in 1992. Company after company once synonymous with the city —
Montgomery Ward and Amoco, among them — has either died or moved out of
town.
Mayor Daley said the following…kinda interesting – the 2 perspectives.
That was the mayor’s point when he talked about the decision to change Marshall Field’s to Macy’s.
“Things change,” Daley told reporters in September. “If you aren’t willing to accept change, then you stay in the past, and we’re never going to stay in the past in this city.”
I saw that article earlier and it made me sad. I’ve lived in Chicago my whole life and over the years I have watched my beloved neighborhood turn from a close-knit, family-oriented community into a homogenized, gentrified, cookie-cutter yuppie commune. Even more disturbing is the fact that I can no longer afford to live in the neighborhood where I grew up because of all the “changes”. So I guess you achieved your goal, Mayor Daley.
I hear you, Freesia. I just returned from a week’s stay in my home city of Montreal – abundant changes, but you know what? We can’t hold onto the past except in our minds, and we always have that. I agree with Daley and Terkel – one is realistic, the other sentimental. We are both. The next generation will have their own remembrances and they will also need to move on. And that’s the way it is.