I grew up in Houston, Texas. I love my home town and I am definately proud to be a native Texan. I've even decorated my house in stars. One day I stopped counting at 67 stars in the bathroom alone, and that wasn't even all of them! I had to laugh when the parent of two of my students emailed me Christopher Solomon's article from the NY Times reviewing Houston and the "Houston. It's worth it." website. You can find both the website and Solomon's review here.
I now live in the Kansas City area. While I still miss Houston at times (especailly in February when I don't remember what warm feels like), we've built a life here. My husband owns a successful business, we love our church, we have many friends, and we're very attached to our massage therepist - she's really amazing and very nice! We've lived in our current house for almost six years now, long enough to do a lot of work and really make it our own. The city of fountains is definately home to us.
All of that said, I visited Chicago last week for the second time in my life, and I fell in love! Chicago is a place that really feels like a city; it's a place the knows how to be a city. Even during the day on a Thursday, downtown was bustling with shoppers. They have a ton of unique and wonderful restaurants. There's just enough grit to let you know it's a real place, but not so much as to be gross or disturbing. Everyone is really friendly, but not in that scary too nice kind of way. The windy city is big enough for everyone, but compacted enough to make it easy to find what you need on foot in the heart of town. If I were offered the chance to move there, I'd probably jump at it!
I've lived in cities my whole life, yet, after our trip to Chicago, I feel like I didn't know what a city really was before. I mentioned my infactuation to a friend last night and he shared his theory with me. My friend talked about the difference between cities that are old enough to have been around longer than the automobile. The light bulb went off for me. Cities like Chicago and New York were built before cars; therefore, they were built much more compact with things much closer together and taller. This means that they look and feel more like cities. They also tend to have better mass transit. Overall, older cities just know how to be cities better than younger ones. People are comfortable living "in" the city; while they have suburbs, many people still comfortably live downtown and amenities are available in the city's core. This is probably what made Chicago feel so "city" to me.
The only problem with the theory is that KC is older than Chicago by about 50 years. So, maybe it comes down to mass transportation and planning. If you build it, they will come? I don't know exactly how it happened, but I do know that Chicago has it right!