Economist.com Cities Guide: Chicago Briefing - July 2006

News this month

Who's afraid of the big bad box

A city council meeting on July 26th may decide the future of “big-box” stores in Chicago. The council will vote on a living-wage law, which requires large retail stores to pay employees a minimum hourly wage of $9.25 plus $1.50 in benefits. The law also mandates increases in both wages and benefits every year until 2010, when the stores would pay $10 in wages and $3 in benefits per hour. Employers would then have to adjust pay in accordance with the local cost-of-living. The law would affect all stores with over 90,000 square feet of retail space and $1 billion in total annual sales—in effect some 40 stores in Chicago, including Marshall Field’s, Nordstrom, Sears, Home Depot, Target and Wal-Mart.

Both Wal-Mart and Target have warned that if the measure passes, they will reconsider their plans to expand in Chicago. A coalition of ministers and community leaders from Chicago’s poor South Side held a protest rally against the ordinance on July 17th, saying their neighbourhoods need the jobs and cheap goods offered by the big-box stores. Supporters, including a majority of the city council and the powerful United Food and Commercial Workers union, suspect the stores are bluffing; Chicago, they contend, is too big a market to give up.

Flying to a new nest

United Airlines has succumbed to the city's courtship, and plans to move its headquarters back to downtown Chicago. The company, lured by financial incentives from the city and state, announced in mid-July that it would return from Elk Grove, a Chicago suburb, reversing the move it made in 1961. After emerging from bankruptcy in February, the airline had been considering moving to Denver or San Francisco. But local politicians offered a $5.25m city tax break and $1.35m in state grants for job training and infrastructure improvement. Both Richard Daley, Chicago’s mayor, and Rod Blagojevich, the governor of Illinois, promised to push for legislation to cap the jet-fuel tax for airlines in the next five years.

During the first quarter of 2007, about 350 management-level employees will move to United’s new headquarters on Wacker Drive; analysts say the transfer will save the company about $7m in the short term, and millions more in the long term. After such companies as Amoco, Quaker and Searle moved their headquarters from the region, Mr Blagojevich desperately wanted to keep Chicago from losing yet another Fortune 500 business—particularly one that employs 16,000 people in the state.

Fat chance

When a city’s culinary strengths are hot dogs, greasy deep-dish pizzas and Italian meat sandwiches of mysterious provenance, it stands to reason that obesity and diabetes are serious problems. But after Men’s Fitness magazine named Chicago America’s fattest city in its annual survey, published in January, one councilman set out to put Chicagoans on a diet. In late June Edward Burke proposed making it illegal for restaurants to cook with trans-fat-laden oils, which raise cholesterol levels and the risk of heart disease. Those who dare use such oils would face daily fines of $200-$1,000. Some have hailed the plan; others condemn it as further meddling in residents' personal lives—the proposal follows a humanitarian ban on foie gras in restaurants, and comes amid schemes to outlaw smoking on the beach and force cabbies to dress better.

Meanwhile, a study commissioned by LaSalle Bank and released on July 18th found higher rates of diabetes, obesity and a range of cancers in “food deserts”—the poor, mostly black neighbourhoods on the city’s south and west sides with few grocery stores but many fast-food restaurants. On average, black Chicagoans travel about 0.6 miles to a grocery store, compared with a city average of 0.45 miles.

Fun and games

A rousing welcome from Mayor Daley kicked off the seventh annual Gay Games on July 17th. Some 12,000 homosexual athletes from 70 countries flocked to Chicago for eight days of sports and cultural events. A lively closing ceremony on July 22nd was headlined by Cyndi Lauper, a pop-singer known for hits from the 1980s, dressed as a rainbow-coloured Statue of Liberty. The games went smoothly, though some controversy was inevitable: in the conservative suburb of Crystal Lake, several residents protested against the games and preached against homosexuality; and on July 18th Repent America, a Christian group, filed a lawsuit claiming that Chicago police had kept them from distributing flyers during the games.

The mayor and other supporters of the Gay Games hope this year’s event will be the first to turn a profit, and perhaps boost Chicago’s profile as a potential host for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Unconfirmed reports make Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles the three American finalists for the 2016 games.

Summer in the city

This year has been the hottest on record in the continental United States, with particularly oppressive heat throughout the north-east and Midwest in mid-July. In Chicago, the warm temperatures revived unwelcome memories of July 1995, when a heat wave killed 735 people, most of them elderly. The city government has set up cooling centres across Chicago to ward off a repeat of that year’s calamity, which claimed more victims than the Great Chicago Fire.

Meanwhile, record demand on the electric grid followed by violent thunderstorms knocked out power for 100,000 customers across Chicago on July 18th. Electricity was restored for most people the next morning. The heat thankfully ebbed by the following weekend.

Catch if you can

July 2006

Harry Callahan: The Photographer at Work

Until September 24th 2006

You would be hard-pressed to find a photographer who snapped so many pictures and kept so few as Harry Callahan, a post-war American photographer, who did much of his best work in Chicago. When he wasn't teaching photography, Callahan spent his mornings walking the streets and taking pictures—first in Detroit, then Chicago and finally in Providence—and his afternoons developing the day's prints. Yet for all this work, he produced only about six final images each year.

Callahan's work is intensely personal, and his main subjects are Eleanor, his wife, and Barbara, his daughter. This exhibition features about 125 photographs, along with their corresponding negatives, proof prints, contact sheets and unpublished alternative developments of the same negatives. The wealth of material sheds new light on the decision-making process of this most meticulous artist, who died in 1999.

The Art Institute of Chicago, 111 South Michigan Ave. Tel: +1 (312) 443-3600. Open: Mon-Wed 10.30am-5pm; Thurs-Fri 10.30am-9pm; Sat-Sun 10am-5pm. Entry: $12. For more information, visit the Institute’s website.

More from the Chicago cultural calendar