Whether your name is Barack Obama, David Mamet, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey or whatever, you are a Chicagoan—or from Chicago—and it marks you.

For better or worse, political candidates, entertainers and people in the public eye especially bear the mark of their neighborhood, suburb, city or state.

So do we all!

But how Chicago?

What is this metropolis of ours and what brand does it leave on people’s hearts and minds?

And why?

Is Chicago:
A. A city of rampant crime, political corruption and go-to-hell sin?
B. An over-populated and sprawling inland metropolis with an inferiority complex about its reputation and limitations?
C. A deeply original and creative American city that has disdained many of the blandishments of an East Coast culture that was borrowed from and is imitative of the upper classes of Europe?

Each person anywhere who holds to any one of these viewpoints feels he or she can use it to understand and interpret current or former Chicagoans.

Often, we stand too close to the city to see others or ourselves in terms of these views, but others do…all the time.

World travelers—at the mention of Chicago—have reported that even small children in far distant lands greeted the city’s name by going “rat-a-ta-tat” as though they were imitating a machine gun.
Increasingly, travelers talk of experiencing at least a grudging respect for Chicago architecture, its parks, the people’s openness and directness, sports figures and theaters, its improv theater, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Oprah Winfrey, the city’s museums, its poetic tradition, literature and newly-found focus on nature, especially its trees.

It is a list to put up daringly against the breadth of New York, Mother Nature in Alaska, the great national parks or the historical monuments of Boston and Philadelphia.

One expects to find in Chicago an authenticity, a directness of speech, an originality in its theater and writers, a creativity that marks its art and design, a freshness that can be heard in its music performances and musical compositions at the symphony concerts or blues bars.

It is all the more genuine because Chicago finds so many ways to give its creativity away for free or a low admission fee.

Its art, architecture and design seem more often public, something to be enjoyed rather than worth X number of dollars.

These qualities of originality and creativity are the keys to appreciating Chicago.

A conference at the University of Hamburg several years back celebrated these Chicago characteristics as speaker after speaker spoke of discovering the city and its creative impulses in almost every field of human endeavor from advertising to poetry.

A leading Tokyo magazine sent a team of reporters and photographers to record the same aspect of Chicago.

This is nothing new.

In 1917, literary giant H. L. Mencken asked:
“The most civilized city in America? Chicago, of course! And per corollary, the most thoroughly American, at least among the big ones. A culture is bogus unless it is honest, which means it is truly national—the naive and untinctured expression of a national mind and soul.”

In 1939, Frank Lloyd Wright wrote:
“The greatest and most nearly beautiful city of our young nation is probably Chicago. Eventually, I think Chicago will be the most beautiful city left in the modern world.”

What were they talking about?

The answer can best be found in the words of two other Chicagoans who point to a deep, pervasive chaos that urges on the city’s deepest impulses.

Artist Ed Paschke asked,
“What is art?”
His answer: “Organized chaos.”

Educator and philosopher John Dewey commented:
“Chicago is the place to make you appreciate at every turn the opportunity which chaos affords.”

And what is chaos?
That which has no mold, substance without prefabricated form, opportunity free of pre-established rules. Chaos is words, sounds, colors, stone, wood, movement, notes that give humans the chance to make an indigenous mark in the universe.
And what is creativity?

It is a process by which men, women and children play or often struggle with chaos and transform it into something that has taken on beauty and purpose.

It is this chaos with its opportunities and this creativity with its thorough rejection of imitation that makes Chicago as unique and original as it is.

With chaos at its core and creativity at its fingertips, Chicago—at its best—manages to draw far outside the lines in architecture, art, theater, literature and even politics, to the benefit of all.

Why?

Because Chicago can.
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Kenan Heise, a member of Chicago’s Newspaper Hall of Fame, is a veteran of city journalism having served as columnist for the old Chicago American, Chicago Today and for years as an
editor at the Chicago Tribune, is a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer.