Never a City So Real: A Walk in Chicago

Alex Kotlowicz mostly succeeds with this slice-of-life look at Chicago's grittier side. He begins by interviewing Ed Sadlowski, former steelworker and union official living on the southeast side where most of the mills have shuttered. Equally interesting was the view from Edna's restaurant in the west side ghetto where there are few businesses other than liquor stores. We also hear from an artist that paints murals for residents in public housing, a neighborhood of recent immigrants from many lands, a gadfly that fights corruption in the border suburb of Cicero (former headquarters of Al Capone), and several others. In many ways the author captures the city's feel, and allows readers to see how Chicago has evolved into a mostly post-industrial city, yet one where poverty and fear of minorities and violence remain touchstones for some. Oddly the author, who moved here 20 years ago from New York City, alternates praise with suggestions that the most successful see Chicago as unlovely and leave. In reality, most stay put in middle-class neighborhoods (or suburbs), acknowledging the city's problems, but prideful of our vibrant economy, superb lakefront, museums, parks, skyline, and universities - Chicago leads the USA in Nobel Prize winners. Despite small flaws, this is a revealing, concise, readable book.

A Walk in Chicago: Never a City So Real by Alex Kotlowitz Crown Journeys, Crown: New York 2004 159 pp. Hardcover The "Big Onion" is better than the "Big Apple" in many ways, and Alex Kotlowitz, a former New Yorker who has made Chicago his home for over twenty years, sets out to prove how great and diverse his adopted city really is. As he writes in his introduction, "Chicago is a place of passion and hustle...a place eternally in transition, always finding yet another way to think of itself, a city never satisfied." But this is not the Chicago of the Art Institute, of Michigan Avenue, of Water Tower Place, or the Magnificent Mile. This is the Chicago of the South Side housing projects, the South East's closed steel mills, of Division Street and the 26th Street Criminal Court. It is the Chicago of the resilient and dedicated people who make their own neighborhoods places that come to life with positive energy and social change. In Kotlowitz's book you meet "Oil Can Eddie," AKA, Ed Sadlowski, the retired steelworker who climbed the ranks of union leadership and "...who loves his city's opera, its museums, and its baseball teams..." You read about how this steelworker went from the steel furnace to the cover of Time Magazine, and how the union that he organized created a better life for its workers, and how that working life is now in peril. The 64-year old Sadlowski takes Kotlowitz on a city tour in his beat-up "Crown Vic" to places off the tourist map, places like Pinkerton's gravesite and the Calumet Riverfront where the strikers once clashed with police. You get to lunch at Manny's Jewish Deli just south of the Loop, the hangout for political bosses and pit stop for every major politician who swings through Chicago. Then it's off to Edna's soul food restaurant with his two social worker friends, Millie and Brenda. As they sit down to eat, we get to overhear their conversation as if we were sitting in the next booth. This lets the reader eavesdrop on some of the problems that plague this city, from gangs in public housing to unwed teenage mothers. But in Kotlowitz's hands, the city is brought to life through the eyes of Millie and Brenda. And we get to meet Edna, sixty-six years old, who in the middle of taking lunch orders hears gunshots and runs out onto the street to shoo away the gang kids with her apron. We meet Milton Reed, the lanky street artist who paints provocative murals for the residents of the projects, and we tag along while Milton sets up his sketch pad on the street corner so that he can sketch portraits of parade watchers as the Bud Billiken Parade winds its way through the city's South Side, a still racially divided part of Chicago. Next we meet the embodiment of Sandburg's "City of Big Shoulders" in the form of a sturdily built six-foot female attorney, Andrea Lyon, who once while being attacked for her bag, punched her mugger so hard she broke his jaw. This imposing former public defender now works as a

Alex Kotlowitz is an apt reporter. He does his homework, and he uses what must be months and months of research to pepper his stories with fascinating historical context. He tells stories simply, starkly, beautifully. He knows when his sources are the best ones to narrate, and he steps out of their way; his instincts about when to step back in to provide context and analysis are always right on target. In this book, as in his others, he has a way of telling sources' stories that makes it seem as though he has found the most incredible, exceptional people around. But therein lies his talent, I think: He finds compelling stories in the most common of people, and he seems to value the notion that everyone has a story to tell. His abilities make this book about Chicago a book that non-Chicagoans would enjoy. It's just good writing and reporting.

I have spent the better part of two decades in Chicago. I love this city and have explored its neighborhoods and history. When I moved here from Indiana as I boy, my world opened up and the city appeared to offer almost unlimited possibilities. Now I have lived in and visited other cities and can compare Chicago to NYC, Paris, London, Copenhagen, Prague, Seoul, SF, LA, Singapore, etc. Yet I've never been able to give visitors from other places a complete and accurate picture of what makes this city so special and unique. This book perfectly captures the essence of Chicago without clichés, generalizations or sentimentality. It captures the entrepreneurial spirit that led to reversing the flow of a major river, the creation of retail giants and the establishment of one of the greatest civic projects of recent times (Millennium Park). It explores the triumphs of one of the most vibrant and varied immigrant communities in the world without ignoring brutal patterns of discrimination and inequality. It does all of this in a relatively small number of pages with what seems like an effortless ability to swing from laugh-out-loud humor to deep sadness and back again. The only regret that I have about this book is that I finished it in one sitting and wanted it to keep going. The author attempted to create a portrait of Chicago in the year 2004 and achieved something of even broader and more significant meaning. The people are so vivid and wonderful that the book transcends the categories of biography, travel, anthropology, etc and should be read by because it is simply a timeless and extremely entertaining story.

In Alex Kotlowitz' capable hands, Chicago, the city with the big shoulders, emerges as a metropolis with an enormous heart. Written as part of the Crown Journeys series, his "Never a City So Real" celebrates the vitality, integrity and diversity of the city through discreet narratives of its people. Kotlowitz avoids both the familiar and the cliché about Chicago, instead focusing on a set of characters who capture the "flesh and bone...the lifeblood" of the city. Possessing "passion and hustle," the relatively unheralded Chicagoans whom Kotlowitz focuses attention personify the city with their grit, honesty and succinct energy. It is unsurprising, therefore, that the fist person the author uses to symbolize Chicago is his father-in-law, Jack Woltjen, whose talents, vision and intensity emerge as larger-than-life. Part huckster, part social egalitarian, Woltjen has the "passion and hustle" Chicago extols as virtues. Kotlowitz understands why Woltjen was "celebrated" in Chicago; his "entrepreneurial spirit and his unwavering belief in himself" not only persuades others of his worth but transforms the very city that provides him the opportunity to live. Iconoclastic (he doctors paintings of the masters), indignant (he exposes police brutality against the Black Panthers) and idealistic (he serves as an agent for the integration of segregated neighborhoods), Woltjen embodies Chicago's penchant for contradictions. Even a sculpture in his backyard captures a "beautiful juxtaposition of power and fragility." Mocked by a "New Yorker" columnist as "the Second City," Chicago unabashedly refused offense. Eventually, the city's fabled comedy troupe adopts the name. Its geographic location resulted in Chicago's emergence as a center of commerce and a magnet for the "cascade of immigrant groups" which now call it home. Its physical insularity, separated from self-aggrandizing New York and the glitz of Los Angeles by half a continent, gives Chicago its own opportunity for self-definition, creation and perpetuation. Kotlowitz consciously selects artists who are either underappreciated or invisible; he portrays men and women who open not only businesses but their hearts to those who are barely getting by. Even his constant reference to Nelson Algren, "himself a bar of discordant notes," reminds us that Chicago often does not recognize its own greatness. It is "an imperfect place," but "Chicago is America's city; it dreams America's dream." We learn of "Oil Can" Eddie Sadlowski, union man who still inspires with his own life's history. We dine with Millie Wortham and Brenda Stephenson, upbeat and optimistic despite working with the most desperate and destitute of Chicago's poor. We learn to bow our own heads down in the presence of the irascible but compassionate Ramazan Celikoski, who runs a hole-in-the-wall diner where "the world intersects...on the city's northwest side." Visitors to Chicago will still clutch their maps and travelogues. Those