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I agree with the mojito chick. Many Chicagoans on this forum have a **** poor attitiude toward other cities and perhaps more deeply an insecurity about themselves. New York is the strong one and at this rate always will be. The spirit of New York is even stronger now than ever because these days the city has lowered its crime, cleaned itself up, and the people are seemingly kinder and gentler post 911. People who think New York is only about finance are brainless dweebs.
What would you know about what goes on here when you just joined?
What's annoying is when some troll like tyler hag feels the need to sign up and tell us how much better NYC is than Chicago. Also, when people from other cities come in to this forum with the sole purpose of telling the people here how much they think Chicago sucks. Of course, people here will get defensive. Also, there seems to be one of thse NYC vs Chicago threads popping up every 6 months or so. What's the point when these threads always end up the same?
Personally, I love both NYC, and Chicago. Both cities have strength and weaknesses. There are cities I have been to that I don't care for Would I ever even think to go into one of their forums to tell the people that or say NYC or Chicago is better than their city? Heck NO! That is my opinion, and who am I to tell them that they shouldn't like where they live. Nobody in this forum seems to compare Chicago to NYC, but these threads still seem to pop up. These people who come here trolling and trumpeting how much better NYC is than Chicago seem to think they've made some incredible revelation, and that the regulars should fall to their feet in immediate agreement. It's tiresome, and old.
I lived in Chicago. It is not Utopia, nor is it the Garden of Eden, but, it is the largest city in the midwest. Chicago has a uniqueness that cannot be compared to any other city nor duplicated due to its history and influx of many peoples. The problems that fueled the mass exodus from Europe to the Colonies in the 17th century were not the same that drove the great western experiment in the 19th century. Ohio was settled nearly 70 years before the Great Fire which - was not only one of the two fures that raged that day it - was the smallest. The Chicago fire received international interest whilst the Greatest Fire in North American history was relegated to oblivion. The Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871
Chicago does not have to compete with any other city except Chicago. To do otherwise is folly. .
What's annoying is when some troll like tyler hag feels the need to sign up and tell us how much better NYC is than Chicago. Also, when people from other cities come in to this forum with the sole purpose of telling the people here how much they think Chicago sucks. Of course, people here will get defensive. Also, there seems to be one of thse NYC vs Chicago threads popping up every 6 months or so. What's the point when these threads always end up the same?
Personally, I love both NYC, and Chicago. Both cities have strength and weaknesses. There are cities I have been to that I don't care for Would I ever even think to go into one of their forums to tell the people that or say NYC or Chicago is better than their city? Heck NO! That is my opinion, and who am I to tell them that they shouldn't like where they live. Nobody in this forum seems to compare Chicago to NYC, but these threads still seem to pop up. These people who come here trolling and trumpeting how much better NYC is than Chicago seem to think they've made some incredible revelation, and that the regulars should fall to their feet in immediate agreement. It's tiresome, and old.
WELL SAID, M.M.
What you see here is far less about describing cities and a heckuva lot more about describing people.
The way I see it is that both New York and Chicago come out pretty damned well here.
Those who pummel these cities, especially on their subforums, come out pretty damned bad.
I'm an idiot though because I bother to respond to these folks. I should realize that when someone like Ty says, "New York is great; Chicago...not so much" and I answer with "Chicago's great; New York is, too", I'm really not communicating, nor does he have any capacity to understand where I'm coming from.
I lived in Chicago for several years before I moved to NYC to start my job post-undergrad. After a few years in NYC, I chose to move back to Chicago for law school.
After law school, I chose to stay in Chicago.
NYC was an interesting place to live. It certainly does offer some unique things you'll only find in Manhattan or its closer boroughs, but the culture and environment of the city are not something I'd ever want to experience again. The population is vastly less cosmopolitan and worldly than the image most Americans-- and in particular, most people on this message board-- have developed from Sex and the City. There is certainly an element of wealthy businesspeople and their ilk sipping martinis, but it's so much smaller than anyone would believe.
It's a city where people are constantly on the clock. Work obsessed, game-playing cut throats who will do anything to make a dollar. If I had to sum up my aesthetic impression of NYC, I would say that one could picture dirty streets filled with stingy opportunists and self-important elitists; people who really don't care anything at all about what the consequences are, so long as they don't have to pay them.
Consider that Manhattan is the birthplace of the business situation we find ourselves in today. One in which a salesman who earns $60,000 a year has a target goal of $60,000,000 so that earnings can be met for investors. Because that's all that really matters; earnings must match estimates or else Wall Street will be angry!
And for all that it is, Manhattan didn't offer the kind of scene I really wanted. The environment and scenery and people... just weren't there. Chicago did. I don't even know by what measure you could say Chicago is better or worse than NYC. Yet for me, Chicago was by far the better alternative. There are other cities around the global I would gladly return to, even live in. NYC is not one of them. I easily conducted my focus on international tax out of the Chicago office of my firm, so I don't buy into the idea that it's any less global of a city.
In the coming years, we're going to see that NYC has chained itself to one industry as surely as Detroit did. Regulation of finance has made it a domestic industry as foreign listings are taken off NYSE and moved to less litigious markets elsewhere. It'll be interesting then as Chicago's trillions of dollars of trade volume will have moved it into a very different arena by that point.
View American cities through the filter of the last 35 years, up to the point when the economy tanked in 2008.
These were heady times for the urban cores of our most major cities, generated by an economy that favored the rich, the powerful and the corporate over the populous. it was a time when services like banking and finance and the lawyers who make them possible thrieved, when real estate was gold, and when cities became all about life style.
Realize, too, that these cities, already living well above their means, had grown so giddy that they had on the drawing boards major projects that, if completed, would have been mind boggling.
Consider, too, that these times generated hubris, the desire to be #1, and a sense of competition-for-the-sake-of-competition.
That reality was shattered by the economic tsumani that hit us last year.
That's why I find it amusing how many people here still view these cities in today's world as being in charge of their own destinies or capable, through plan and practice, of achieving major goals.
The cities are broke. Neither the states or the federal government can bail them out since obviously both those levels of government can't meet their own needs.
Cities like New York and Chicago overbuilt. And now there is neither a need or money for glittering towers or magnificent stadiums (Yankee Stadium and Citifield will go down in history as the shining examples of excess in the face of want, the decline of a civilization). Sadly money isn't available to fix streets, bridges, tunnels, or other essential parts of a crumbling infrastructure.
In the "good times" when places like New York and Chicago were pumped with the energy of development and construction, a radical reordering of the landscape, what was lost to many of us was the fact that all their new glory was coming at the expense of who they were. Gone were the local stores, restaurants, and other institutuions, replaced by the chains that were located coast to coast. Times Square got sanitized into Disneyland North. Michigan Avenue is far more plastic today, a tribute to the very material used to make credit cards.
What power do any cities have today? Decisions for virtually all we do are made in multinational corporate HQ's which not only no longer relate to cities, but to nations as well. Our global cities are merely nodes plugged into a network, more cooperative than competive as they work together to make the system function (although its functionality is very much in question).
Cities that were once considered great due to the energy they created from their artists of all sorts (performing and visual) and the arts they generated. Today artists and intellectuals are often squeezed out of the very urban fabric due to the city being like everything else today: built around the marketplace. What sells is more important than what is quality....and art and city both suffer in the process.
Indeed our technologies today have become so removed from what is "live" and "in person" that the same sorts of entertainment we have today are almost as available in Omaha and Spokane as in New York and Chicago.
We are entering a time when we should be glad if our cities are able to pick up the garbage and supply us with clean water. The whole "vision thing" is over. And even so many of the facts still left on the ground will be compromised with less money, fewer resources, growing population, and other ills.
Cities like all civilization are ephemeral; they do not last. It is for the moment. We look at New York's grand status, the ultimate World's Greatest City, but are so short sighted that we don't realize that less than a century back, New York was well down the list of greatest global cities.
A moment in time. There will be no eternal city to replace Rome which lost its own eternity years ago.
Things change. Chicago once ruled the convention trade. No matter how many times McCormick Place expands, that reality is no longer the case and we aren't getting it back. New York still generates power that boggles the mind...but how much of that power can do one bit of good if climate change raises sea levels, and with them the Hudson, the East River, New York harbor, and Long Island Sound?
My sense is that our whole concept of "The Battle of the Cities" will appear quaint in time as cities not only become less in control of their own destinies but less able to meet the very needs they were created to meet.
[quote=coldwine;11959888]
It's a city where people are constantly on the clock. Work obsessed, game-playing cut throats who will do anything to make a dollar. If I had to sum up my aesthetic impression of NYC, I would say that one could picture dirty streets filled with stingy opportunists and self-important elitists; people who really don't care anything at all about what the consequences are, so long as they don't have to pay them.
[quote]
That doesnt sound like the NYC I left behind; except the part about the dirty streets! I don't think they are constantly on the clock that much more than Chicago. New Yorkers are more into their work because of the nature of their careers and to an extent it's the culture there. When you move to Chicago the salaries and bonuses are alot less than New York but the cost of living is also less. Chicagoans still need to work long hours sometimes to keep their heads above water in the big city or learn to be frugal. The better jobs are not as much in the city of Chicago anymore. Stingy opportunists? Self important elitists? This is still America right?
... Chicago is constantly "reinventing itself" Is Chicago going to keep on doing that forever? ...
I wasn't going to post in this thread, but I feel drawn to comment on this question:
ALL strong, vibrant cities constantly reinvent themselves. To not do so means being stuck bringing a knife to a gun fight, to paraphrase a classic movie set in Chicago.
Look at London, a city that is an undisputed peer to New York - sure, it holds to some pieces, but it's still vastly different than it was 100 years ago, 200 years ago, 500 years ago. Many of the things tourists love about Paris were created by tearing down old parts of the city 170 years ago and building what you see now. Now it has a modern office tower district on the edge of the city, too, and still does tear down and rebuild many buildings. Look at Tokyo, Shanghai, Buenos Aires, any major urban center, and they're constantly changing. Some things get torn down, others get built, the very best pieces get preserved and, over time, the "very best pieces" accumulate into denser clusters. Paris and London both have something like an 1800 year head start on Chicago, New York has a couple hundred years.
Don't let the population loss mean more than it should, either. Paris metro is similar in size to Chicago, but the central city of Paris lost proportionally more people in the second half of the 20th century than any other city in the world that had over 2 million residents. That sort of puts Chicago's population loss in perspective (and maybe Detroit's and St. Louis's, too).
Chicago will keep reinventing itself to stay competitive. No city that settles on one form can remain an internationally relevant city. And when I say "city" in this context, I mean metro area. San Fancisco's metro area should include Silicon Valley, which is an enormous reinvention of what the Bay Area once was.
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WELL SAID, M.M.
