Reason Writers Around Town

David Weigel | September 4, 2006

Over at the Los Angeles Times, Nick Gillespie mourns the Chicago of chizzbogers and beer and rejects the Chicago of soy pate and cell phone bans.

Comments

|9.4.06 @ 2:28AM|#

Steve Irwin is dead.

|9.4.06 @ 2:29AM|#

Steve Irwin is dead.

|9.4.06 @ 11:36AM|#

"Steve Irwin is dead."

Crykees, sniff. :(

|9.4.06 @ 12:43PM|#

I visited Chicago in 1998 and thought it was nothing more than a city of crazy mustache people threatening to beat everyone's asses. Fast forward to 2006 and what we have is a gentrified, yuppified city that is, like New York City, a sad museum of its former self.

|9.4.06 @ 1:25PM|#

I love how everyone's recollections of how badass Chicago used to be seem to be based on a single visit. Yeah, it was quite the libertarian paradise when Daley's cops were beating any random person who looked like a hippie or a reporter and conducting botched raids which they then covered up.

|9.4.06 @ 2:31PM|#

"Daley's cops were beating any random person who looked like a hippie or a reporter and conducting botched raids which they then covered up."
So, are you saying that my impression after a one time visit was somewhat accurate?

|9.4.06 @ 5:15PM|#

"Daley's cops were beating any random person who looked like a hippie or a reporter and conducting botched raids which they then covered up."

While hippies and reporters may not be the targets of police brutality any longer, it is naive to assume that the Chicago police don't continue to commit assaults and illegal raids with impunity.

Jeff Smith|9.5.06 @ 11:13AM|#

The poem I wrote about Chicago shortly after arriving there for graduate school is here:

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~econjeff/Papers/Ode%20to%20Chicago.pdf

I never did grow to like the place much. It seemed like a whole city of people who thought of life as a zero-sum game.

Jeff

joanne|9.5.06 @ 3:20PM|#

yeah, yeah, yeah, but we also have no rent control. i lived alone in the chicago equivalency of adams-morgan for $450 a month. here, artists and musicians can afford to live off their craft.

a city of dead pleasures it most certainly is not: http://www.gapersblock.com/