[sentinel]

Originally Posted by galleyfox

What makes you think it was just a 50s-70s problem instead of an “entire U.S. history” problem? Wishing for Chicago to be populated by different people with a different culture and mentality ...doesn’t lead to anything. Chicago is Chicago, and the city will change organically according to whoever decides to make it their home.

For example, a huge plot point of ‘The Great Gatsby’ if you read carefully is that it’s about people from Chicago going to New York for NYC’s sophisticated and glamorous lifestyle and ruining everything. Because even back then Chicago was a negative buzzword with most of the same criticisms as today.

—“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all--Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.”

As for marketing, it’s hard to fight back against tropes dating back to the Civil War. There’s always going to be one city in the nation to be the stand-in for anti-urban sentiment and societal ills, and Chicago got that dubious honor practically since the city was founded.

Have you ever heard of a city named 'Detroit'?