"Never A Lovely So Real" a Chicago Travel Page by yooperprof

I've been updating my Chicago pages (i.e. as of September 2007) - you have to stay on your feet in order to keep up with the ever-changing Windy City! You'll find lots of new architectural tips on the "general" pages - newly arranged restaurant tips - along with a few new coffee tips and restaurant suggestions (Union Park, Marche, Red Light) and improved beer coverage (The Beer Bistro, Hopleaf, Hop Haus, etc).

". . . that astonishing Chicago - a city where they are always rubbing the lamp, and fetching up the genii, and contriving and achieving new impossibilities. It is hopeless for the occasional visitor to try to keep up with Chicago - she outgrows his prophecies faster than he can make them. She is always a novelty; for she is never the Chicago you saw when you passed through the last time."

"Life on the Mississippi," Mark Twain -- 1883

"Once you've come to be a part of this particular patch, you'll never love another. Like loving a woman with a broken nose, you may well find lovelier lovelies. But never a lovely so real."

Nelson Algren, "City on the Make"

[thanks to Alex Kotlowitz for his new 2004 book about Chicago, "Never a City So Real," which is inspired by Algren's earlier work.)

"Here, of all her cities, throbbed the true life -- the true power and spirit of America; gigantic, crude with the crudity of youth, disdaining rivalry; sane and healthy and vigorous; brutal in its ambition, arrogant in the new-found knowledge of its giant strength, prodigal of its wealth, infinite of its desires."

"The Pit," Frank Norris -- 1904