The obvious danger in becoming attached to cities is that they change.  The intrinsic creative capacity that draws us in will eventually break our hearts.  The evolution of cities mercilessly builds over the past, leaving old timers to bemoan the loss of “character” or “heart.”  Every generation believes the city of its time was less sanitized and more raw than the present incarnation.   Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker explores this phenomenon with regard to Mumford’s own New York.  Gopnik wonders whether the well-documented cleansing of New York’s most offensive qualities has eliminated that which is quintessentially New York.   Gopnik writes:

[The] one thing that leaves many New Yorkers worried, or at least uneasy … is the sense that the city’s recovery has come at the cost of a part of its identity: that New York is safer and richer but less like itself, an old lover who has gone for a face-lift and come out looking like no one in particular. The wrinkles are gone, but so is the face. This transformation is one you see on every street corner in Manhattan, and now in Brooklyn, too, where another local toy store or smoked-fish emporium disappears and another bank branch or mall store opens. For the first time in Manhattan’s history, it has no bohemian frontier. Another bookstore closes, another theatre becomes a condo, another soulful place becomes a sealed residence. These are small things, but they are the small things that the city’s soul clings to.

I have similar sense of loss with regard to Chicago, the city of my youth.  I grew up in the suburbs and relished every opportunity to visit the city.  I recall taking the train to a then run-down Union Station and stepping over homeless men in the doorways.  There was an exciting unfamiliarity to the pace and character of the city, particularly for a kid fed a daily diet of homogeneity in the suburbs.  The urban renaissance of the past two decades has changed much of what I remember fondly of the Chicago of my youth and early adult years.

The reality, of course, is that our memories of the past are sugarcoated by nostalgia.  The city that we miss never really existed.  What we miss is the feeling of experiencing the vibrancy of the city anew.  We conveniently underestimate the daily headaches posed by the “diverse mosaic” and overlook our own role in the city’s transformation as gentrifiers and importers of non-indigenous consumer tastes.  Jay Weiser, writing in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard (subscription required), thinks that we should embrace what our cities have become, even without the iconic melting pot.  Modern cities, according to Weiser, are a reflection of the competition within “polycentric metropolitan areas” and must therefore appeal to a more narrow range of residents.  We may long for cities that open their arms to all, but Weiser believes that cities are right to welcome the affluent and creative classes.  Efforts to win over the middle class, the bread and butter customers of the suburbs, are doomed to fail.  I’m more sanguine about the prospects for maintaining a middle class within our cities, but I do agree that the modern city is a product of the same market forces that have shaped urban communities for centuries.

Nelson Algren, the award-winning author of The Man With the Golden Arm, wrote about a mid-20^th century Chicago filled with drunks, hoodlums, prostitutes and other stereotypical down-and-outs.  In my early twenties, I went through a period in which I tried to read as much by Algren as possible, in a quixotic attempt to inhabit, in some kind of spiritual way, his Chicago.  The Chicago of his books pulsated with life.  Not the pub crawl nightlife associated with modern Chicago and other cities, but a harsh, cold life that forced you to live each minute as if it were your last.  Some fantasy.   I was cheating on my own city with someone else’s fictionalized version of the past.  Maybe I should have paid more attention to Algren’s stories.  His characters were consistently disappointed by what Chicago had to offer, yet were always drawn back to their neighborhood.  Their affection for their city was not tarnished by its obvious imperfections, and they fully recognized the one-sidedness of the relationship.  They were just along for the ride – an unpredictable, heart-wrenching but uplifting ride.