Quote:
Originally Posted by JK47
Which is a very long winded way of saying that while he saw the glass as being half empty you saw it as being half full.
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He was also apparently talking about the entire city of Chicago (I.e. black culture on the south side) while I was specifically referring to the immediate surroundings of downtown. I'm pretty sure that such lovely land uses as Cabrini Green and the beautiful atmosphere produced by the clouds of radioactive thorium being cranked out of the Lindsay Light Company would be considered pretty darn close to a sea of despair to most people. My comment wasn't even about "real estate opportunity", it was an amazed observation of just how objectively the downtown area has improved in merely a couple of decades. I don't think anyone can seriously think downtown was better before all the "old world industires" were relocated to green field sites in the burbs. Also, those industries were not at all "old world" it's not as if downtown Chicago considered of blacksmith shop, stables, and quaint wind powered grist mills. This is the crucible of modern industrial capitalism we are talking about here. While extremwly impressive and cool, let's not make out Mr. Armour dumping billions of gallons of animal entrails into the river while his buddies constructed factory towns and virtually enslaved the populist as some kind of olde tymey paradise. Let's also not mistake the ruins of the reality (I.e. the 1980s wastelands around downtown) as anything but an interesting, fleeting reality. While that was a cool era, I'm glad it is past.