Big plans, elaborate schemes and grand designs sort of messily bleeding into one another [have] created Chicago's reputation for rawness. But that rawness is just ambition-sometimes ambition run amuck-that has acquired a life of its own.
Nor is it out of character that Chicago's grandest achievement- a largely manmade arc of lakefront parks and beaches - began as a mistake. from waste thrown into Lake Michigan a 75-year-old dump.
Chicago is a city of contradictions, of private visions haphazardly overlaid and linked together. If the city was unhappy with itself yesterday-and invariably it was-it will reinvent itself today.
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