Chicago from the Air [antikvár]

Introduction S hicago is not just ^^ the Loop and the Magnificent Mile. Neither is it the account, the face, the colors, lines, drawings and materials of the most daring innovations in international architecture, nor is it Lake Michigan, the series of city parks, the beaches, the melting pot of a thousand cultures, flavors, stnells. memories, anxieties and dreams of the many peoples that have made the United States what it is (there are more Poles in Chicago than in any cily in Poland except for Warsaw). It is not just these things, it is all of them. The plot of a story that seems like a novel is woven among the thousand records of this inimitable city, against the background of these skyscrapers, on the waves of Lake Michigan and above and beneath the bridges of the Chicago River. Following the Great Fire in Chicago, whilst its ashes were still hot, the plan was drawn up that was to bring the Big Onion into exis- tence, the metropolis that formed the meeting point of the north and south, and east and west of the United States of America. Chicago lies at the heart of the Midwest and is the most American and futuristic city in the USA. As Oscar Wilde wrote, the youth of America is its oldest tradition. Chicago is the land of paradoxes: green parks and sk>'scrap-ers, the lake, sailing boats, jogging and a business district where, minute by minute, wealth is created and destroyed. It is the intersection of the horizontal lines of the Great Plains with the vertical ones of the lay cathedrals that pierce the sky The writer Nelson Algren captured the spirit of this kingdom of the oxymoron when he described it as a beautiful woman with a broken nose. Slaughterhouses and Impressionist art galleries exist side by side.