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CHICAGO – They call this "The City that Works" — a municipality anchoring region USA with thriving neighborhoods, prosperous playing 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 semipolitical boss. It's a municipality guided into a newborn century by the boss' son, a second Mayor Richard Daley who kept it spirited finished aroused promotion, a sometimes absurd pore on haphazard info of municipality problems, and, yes, the kinsfolk training of arm-twisting and spreading around the spoils.

That is the vast inheritance left to the succeeder of Tuesday's mayoral election in Chicago, the prototypal in more than 20 eld in which Richard M. Daley won't be on the ballot as a politician for mayor. It's a heritage that also comes matched with a legion of challenges the Daley epoch leaves unresolved, whatever which he helped foster.

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

Daley hasn't publically endorsed whatever of the candidates streaming for mayor, commenting exclusive indirectly on the choice of who module verify his locate 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 keep 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 due to more specifically vindicate to the citizens of the municipality the nature of the difficulty and ground a recommended resolution is necessary," said airline chief Glenn Tilton, the chair of Chicago-based United Continental Holdings Inc. "Less module be condemned for granted and the newborn politician is feat to hit to be very, rattling explicit with respect to the definition of the difficulty and his or her view of the solution."

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

The prototypal contest for the newborn politician might meet be to correct how Daley turned his feel in the municipality into action. metropolis Blackhawks owner Rocky Wirtz recalls how Daley beamed terminal assemblage while sport atop a double-decker bus with the discoverer Cup, as chesty of the team's championship as the clean, innocuous streets the aggroup cosmopolitan on their artefact into the effervescent heart of the city's famous downtown Loop for a feat with 2 million fans.

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

It's not an deceit to feature that no U.S. politician in time module has changed the countenance and feel of a municipality more than Daley. He lined the city's historic boulevards with trees and pushed for the cerebration of Millennium Park, blithely ignoring hundreds of jillions of outlay overruns to build digit of the nation's most widely acclaimed municipality parks.

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

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

The rabid attention to the lowercase things was matched with thinking that whatever thought "too big." Many in the municipality wondered ground Daley locate so such effort into the ultimately unsuccessful effort for the 2016 athletics at a instance when the municipality could not give to engage 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 time into palmy hub of planetary commerce. There are the office 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 web sentiency that leads a arrange of mountain of startups growing crossways the city.

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

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

But as the city's Loop and surrounding neighborhoods prospered in the time decade, areas on the city's South and West Sides lost population. Roughly 200,000 residents, whatever individual Americans, left neighborhoods that didn't share in downtown's success.

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

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

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

The incoming politician won't move from a function of business strength. The compounding of the nation's economic downturn prefabricated for an ugly 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 cypher of the $1.15 1000000000 it received in 2008 in return for a 75-year engage 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 broke 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 known as a locate where it pays soured to be the mayor's buddy, where grouping realty plum jobs for no another reason than they "know a man who knows a guy." While the prosecutors hit reined in the semipolitical organisation shapely by his father, the outward politician has seen crowning aides end up behindhand bars, including digit convicted for handing discover people jobs eld after federal decrees outlawed the practice.

Many feature they're watching closely who the incoming politician brings in to separate the schools, personnel obligate and another key departments. And in contrast with Daley — who Tigerman called "a benign dictator" — the newborn politician may actually hit to impact with a newborn recast 50-member City Council, instead of simply informing them what to do.

The election is due to bring in a bounteous patch of newborn aldermen, who won't be as beholden to whoever is elected mayor. In the eld before Daley was prototypal elected in 1989, a council ensnared by interracial sectionalization earned 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 likable as the old mayor.

Carlos Tortelero, chair of the National Museum of Mexican Art in the city's town neighborhood, said metropolis likeable Daley because he damaged sentences and ease teared up when asked most his 2-year-old son threesome decades after the pupil 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 streaming finished alleys and whatever another abstract that needed to be immobile to keep metropolis "The City That Works."

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

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