My Kind of Town

A lot of bloggers from our toddlin' town have been causing a bit of a stir over at Theatre Ideas and I was inspired to look up some quotes about Chicago. You may have seen them before, but ... they make me happy to a part of this city.

Chicago is an October sort of city even in spring.
- - - Nelson Algren, Newsweek, August 13, 1984

Perhaps the most typically American place in America.
- - - James Bryce, 1888

Chicago is a city of contradictions, of private visions haphazardly overlaid and linked together. If the city was unhappy with itself yesterday-and invariably it was-it will reinvent itself today.
- - - Pat Colander "A Metropolis of No Little Plans" NY Times 5 May 85

A facade of skyscrapers facing a lake and behind the facade, every type of dubiousness.
- - - E.M. Forster

I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago. . . . I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.
- - - Rudyard Kipling, 1891

Chicago was a town where nobody could forget how the money was made. It was picked up from floors still slippery with blood.
- - - Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 1968

New York is one of the capitals of the world and Los Angeles is a constellation of plastic, San Francisco is a lady, Boston has become Urban Renewal, Philadelphia and Baltimore and Washington wink like dull diamonds in the smog of Eastern Megalopolis, and New Orleans is unremarkable past the French Quarter. Detroit is a one-trade town, Pittsburgh has lost its golden triangle, St. Louis has become the golden arch of the corporation, and nights in Kansas City close early. The oil depletion allowance makes Houston and Dallas naught but checkerboards for this sort of game. But Chicago is a great American city. Perhaps it is the last of the great American cities.
- - - Norman Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 1968

I give you Chicago. It is not London and Harvard. It is not Paris and buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib. It is alive from snout to tail.
- - - H. L. Mencken

Gigantic, willful, young,
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates.
- - - William Vaughn Moody "An Ode in Time of Hesitation," 1901

Chicago will give you a chance. The sporting spirit is the spirit of Chicago.
- - - Lincoln Steffens "The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens," 1931

Chicago is not the most corrupt American city. It's the most theatrically corrupt.
- - - Studs Terkel, 1978

It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago-she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time.
- - - Mark Twain "Life On The Mississippi," 1883