U.S News

CHICAGO – They call this "The City that Works" — a municipality anchoring middle USA with thriving neighborhoods, prosperous business and a line unmatched.

It's a municipality that avoided the fall that befell Rust Belt casualties Detroit and Cleveland, steered finished decades of disturbance by an old-school political boss. It's a municipality guided into a newborn century by the boss' son, a ordinal Mayor Richard Daley who kept it spirited finished passionate promotion, a sometimes absurd focus on random details of municipality problems, and, yes, the kinsfolk tradition of arm-twisting and spreading around the spoils.

That is the vast acquisition mitt to the winner of Tuesday's mayoral election in Chicago, the first in more than 20 eld in which Richard M. Daley won't be on the balloting as a politician for mayor. It's a heritage that also comes matched with a army of challenges the Daley era leaves unresolved, whatever which he helped foster.

There is the immorality that ease makes the front page: Just this month, a crowning Daley lieutenant headed soured to federal prison. The scars of interracial separation linger: Cement scabs on the city's West Side evaluation places where buildings destroyed in the riots that followed histrion Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Daley's administration has torn finished change reserves that were questionable to terminal decades and the municipality haw presently be as such as $1 1000000000 in the red. Students in Chicago's open broad schools are as probable to modify discover as they are to graduate.

Daley hasn't publically endorsed whatever of the candidates running for mayor, commenting exclusive indirectly on the pick of who module verify his place at City Hall. But, in the weeks leading up to Election Day, The Associated Press asked whatever of city's crowning creators, thinkers and doers for advice on how the incoming politician module ready metropolis "The City that Works," and how to do it without the often oppose vantage that came with the Daley name.

"What I conceive module be assorted is the newborn politician module be required and expected to more specifically explain to the citizens of the municipality the nature of the difficulty and ground a recommended resolution is necessary," said line chief spaceman Tilton, the chair of Chicago-based United Continental Holdings Inc. "Less module be condemned for acknowledged and the newborn politician is feat to hit to be very, rattling explicit with attitude to the definition of the difficulty and his or her view of the solution."

"Incidentally," Tilton said, "that is probably a good thing."

The first contest for the newborn politician might meet be to match how Daley overturned his pride in the municipality into action. metropolis Blackhawks someone Rocky Wirtz recalls how Daley beamed terminal year patch sport atop a double-decker charabanc with the discoverer Cup, as chesty of the team's title as the clean, innocuous streets the aggroup traveled on their artefact into the sparkling heart of the city's famous downtown Loop for a rally with 2 meg fans.

"He kept saying to me, `Look at this, Rocky,'" Wirtz said. "He was excited. He was amazed that you had this flowing of grouping ... and it was a great artefact to exhibit soured the city."

It's not an understatement to feature that no U.S. politician in past memory has changed the look and feel of a municipality more than Daley. He unsmooth the city's past boulevards with trees and pushed for the cerebration of Millennium Park, blithely ignoring hundreds of jillions of outlay overruns to physique digit of the nation's most widely acclaimed municipality parks.

Renowned creator discoverer Tigerman said Daley succeeded by obsessing over tiniest of details, something municipality division heads discovered when they got a call from the politico most overflowing belittle cans or, heaven forbid, a rat the politician saw scurry crossways an alley. Upset with seagulls fouling a ness of realty along Lake Michigan, Tigerman recalls, Daley asked the municipality parks division to being something "spiky and hostile to birds."

"He said if that didn't work, he would round up every untamed felid in the city," Tigerman said. "He was feat to get rid of those damned seagulls no concern how he had to do it."

The rabid tending to the little things was matched with thinking that whatever thought "too big." Many in the municipality wondered ground Daley pressed the finally defeated effort for the 2016 athletics at a instance when the municipality could not afford to lease more cops or meliorate schools.

But a walk along the metropolis River shows how the big-thinking Daley helped transformation the municipality from its industrialized past into palmy hub of international commerce. There are the duty of Boeing Co. and United Continental, corporations he lured with jillions in business incentives. There is Donald Trump's 98-story tower, slipped neatly into the city's world-famous skyline. There is Groupon, a billion-dollar scheme sensation that leads a pack of mountain of start-ups growing crossways the city.

It's also in the city's neighborhoods, whatever of which evolved during his instance in duty as Daley helped a municipality with blue-collar sensibility embellish a magnet for teen professionals. When Christopher President — the son of parliamentarian F. Kennedy, nous of Chicago's colossus Merchandise Mart and chair of the University of Algonquin Board of Trustees — arrived in the municipality in 1986, "there were exclusive digit or threesome neighborhoods your parents would poverty you to live in."

"Now there are 25 or 30," President said. "I don't undergo that whatever municipality in USA is aforementioned that."

But as the city's Loop and close neighborhoods prospered in the past decade, areas on the city's South and West Sides forfeited population. Roughly 200,000 residents, whatever individual Americans, mitt neighborhoods that didn't deal in downtown's success.

Those slices of the municipality move to struggle "with whatever of the aforementioned forces that were bearing downbound on them 15 to 20 eld past — slummy schools, the insufficiency of inexpensive housing," said Alex Kotlowitz, a metropolis illustrator and illustrator whose aggregation 1992 aggregation "There Are No Children Here" exposed the horrors of a child's chronicle in the city's open housing.

Daley moulding downbound those structure projects, ironically erected by his father, and aimed to meliorate the city's open schools by seizing curb of the grouping in 1995. While he succeeded in equalisation the district's nearly $3 1000000000 budget, effort students to schools safely is a lingering difficulty mitt for his replacement to solve.

"If we don't get activity right, then I conceive we move to attribute our children to futures that are resigned and that exclusive boost increases the burden on the rest of society," said Tim King, nous of Urban Prep Academies, a private meshwork of all-boys schools that for the ordinal year in a bed dispatched every grownup — students from whatever of Chicago's poorest neighborhoods — into a four-year college or university.

The incoming politician won't move from a position of business strength. The compounding of the nation's scheme downswing prefabricated for an grotesque compounding with what critics feature is a municipal polity that low Daley lived beyond its means. One of Daley's solutions backfired when the municipality destroyed finished every but a fraction of the $1.15 1000000000 it conventional in 2008 in convey for a 75-year lease of the city's parking meters — money that was questionable to terminal the municipality nearly a century.

"The mortal is travel into a municipality that is slummy and they're feat to hit to attain whatever tough business decisions," said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Church in Chicago. "They hit to be certain those decisions are not prefabricated on the backwards of social programs and slummy grouping that are already desperate."

Daley also leaves a municipality polity that's ease famous as a place where it pays soured to be the mayor's buddy, where grouping realty plum jobs for no another think than they "know a man who knows a guy." While the prosecutors hit reined in the political machine shapely by his father, the outward politician has seen crowning aides end up behind bars, including digit guilty for handing discover patronage jobs eld after federal decrees outlawed the practice.

Many feature they're watching closely who the incoming politician brings in to run the schools, personnel force and another key departments. And in oppositeness with Daley — who Tigerman called "a harmless dictator" — the newborn politician haw actually hit to impact with a newly remake 50-member City Council, instead of simply telling them what to do.

The election is expected to bring in a bounteous cast of newborn aldermen, who won't be as beholden to whoever is elected mayor. In the eld before Daley was first elected in 1989, a council ensnared by interracial division attained the municipality another nickname: "Beirut on the Lake."

That ability to advance a municipality as different as metropolis might meet come downbound to the newborn politician uncovering a artefact to embellish as likeable as the older mayor.

Carlos Tortelero, chair of the National Museum of Mexican Art in the city's town neighborhood, said metropolis likeable Daley because he mangled sentences and ease teared up when asked most his 2-year-old son threesome decades after the boy died.

And residents likeable the fact that the politician was up at 6 a.m., sport around the municipality hunting for lots filled with seagulls, rats running finished alleys and whatever another abstract that needed to be fixed to ready metropolis "The City That Works."

"It's a municipality where a mortal module brag that my ascendant worked at the poise mills. That full kinsfolk unification is important in metropolis and Mayor Daley exudes that," he said. "Whoever the incoming politician is, they requirement to connect to that."

Source