Chicago

fortunately, there are no neighborhoods in NYC with "culture" like that in Chicago---you should definitely stay in Chicago

Try to find someone named Rufus who lives there but knows tons about ny re.

Seriously, "culture" is pretty vague. Are you able to be more serious about what you seek?

tiki is probably a museum-goer.
Upper west side and ues most museumly parts of town.

uws most like Chicago on cold days but it won't be getting as cold as Chicago tikithomas.
Mid-Jan. in Chicago can see -3 degrees and 3 feet of snow.
The membrane on your eyes freezes and also the inside of your nose.
And they still made me go out to eat at Shaw's Crab House. I could never get used to that kind of severe cold.

Downtown chicago "feel" can be found in Battery park city and financial district. mostly renters. windy. nice appartements. no services. little "spirit".
Sturdy middle class chicago stuff can be found in midtown west, hells kitchen,uptown (african american/hispanics) and the peripheral boroughs (brooklyn (blue collar), queens (middle international class),staten island (retarded middle class) and bronx (blacks).
corruption chicago style is very prevalent anywhere in NYC, but particularly on wall street.

There were many years when I had to be in Chicago for business once a month. One of my children and my grandchildren live in a suburb of Chicago. So I've put in some time there. Other than the unforgettable South Side, I have never been able to differentiate among the neighborhoods in Chicago. It would be easier if you tell us what kind of neighborhood you live in now and what you're looking for.

And yes, I thought of Rufus, too.

Lincoln Park feels a little like the Upper West Side (graystones, etc.) while the Gold Coast feels most like the Upper East Side (Lenox Hill, not Yorkville).

You might get more help if you tell us where you currently live in Chicago.

As a former resident of Lincoln Park, I would say the West Village and Brooklyn Heights have a more similar feel than the UWS. I agree that the Upper East -- west of 2nd Ave -- best approximates the Gold Coast. This is all roughly speaking, of course. I think if you are looking for the NYC equivalent of Wicker Park, you would say the East Village or Williamsburg. FiDi is kind of like downtown Chicago near Millennium Park and the West Loop. Perhaps living in Chelsea is like living in Wrigleyville.

Agree with others you should tell us what you are looking for in a neighborhood. In the humble opinion of most NYers, the worst neighborhood in NYC is better than the best neighborhood in Chicago.

One's age, lifestyle and budget often define people's home search in NYC. Do you want a car and suburban-centric urban neighborhood that is clean. like Chicago is? I say the UES, or Turtle Bay, since a quick commute via car to the Hamptons seems to be part of those neighborhood's appeal. If you're youngish, don't ignore Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Are there streeteasies for Chicago and LA and the other secondary cities?

UWS has the Museum of Natural History. Lincoln Center and Time Warner Center(which is similar to The Water Tower Building in Chicago).Walk to the west -- there's water (but no beach. Hey, this is N.Y.C. -- we go to the beach!). Walk to the east, there's Central Park.

That's as "like" Chicago as it gets here.

Thanks everyone we moved to the Financial District and love it.

Chicago Manuals
‘The Third Coast,’ by Thomas Dyja, and More
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/books/review/the-third-coast-by-thomas-dyja-and-more.html?pagewanted=3
By RACHEL SHTEIR

Published: April 18, 2013

“Poor Chicago,” a friend of mine recently said. Given the number of urban apocalypses here, I couldn’t tell which problem she was referring to. Was it the Cubs never winning? The abominable weather? Meter parking costing more than anywhere else in America — up to $6.50 an hour — with the money flowing to a private company, thanks to the ex-mayor Richard M. Daley’s shortsighted 2008 deal? Or was it the fact that in 2012, of the largest American cities, Chicago had the second-highest murder rate and the ­second-highest combined sales tax, as well as the ninth-highest metro foreclosure rate in the country? That it’s the third-most racially segregated city and is located in the state with the most underfunded public-employee pension debt? Was my friend talking about how a real estate investor bought The Chicago Tribune and drove it into bankruptcy? Or how 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, who performed at the festivities for Barack Obama’s inauguration, was shot dead near the president’s Kenwood home?

Actually, “poor” seems kind. And yet even as the catastrophes pile up, Chicago never ceases to boast about itself. The Magnificent Mile! Fabulous architecture! The MacArthur Foundation! According to The Tribune, Chicago is “America’s hottest theater city”; the mayor’s office touts new taxi ordinances as “huge improvements.” The mayor likes brags that could be read as indictments too, announcing the success of sting operations busting a variety of thugs and grifters.

The swagger has bugged me since I moved here from New York 13 years ago. So I was interested to learn in “Chicago by Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America” — a new annotated Northwestern University Press edition of an 1892 guidebook — that it initially surfaced in the era of wild growth after the Great Fire of 1871. In their 1909 plan, Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett predicted that by 1950, Chicago would house 13.5 million people.

Today, Chicago has fallen short of such dreams. The city’s population, for example, is currently at 2.7 million, having dropped since a high of 3.6 million in 1950. But the bloviating roars on, as if hot air could prevent Chicago from turning into Detroit.

Before anyone accuses me of being some latter-day A. J. Liebling, whose 1952 book “Chicago: The Second City” infuriated residents, let me say there are some good things about living here. The beauty of Lake Michigan. A former rail yard has become Millennium Park. Thanks to global warming, the winters have softened.

In 1968, Norman Mailer called Chicago “the great American city,” but he was particularly prone to Chicago’s idea of itself. Today, a big part of Chicago’s problem stems from that mythology; while the mayor embarks on a P.R. campaign for the “global” city, many locals cling to its tough-guy, blue-collar, gangster-worship identity.

“Golden,” by Jeff Coen and John Chase, is a case in point. The authors describe the ex-governor Rod Blagojevich’s crookedness by employing Nelson Algren’s garish phrase about Chicago’s founders — “they all had hustler’s blood” — as if being born here predisposes you to graft.

It’s easy to see why Coen and Chase, both reporters at The Tribune, lean on such clichés. Blago is the fourth of the last seven governors in this state to go to jail. “Golden” takes its title from a notorious moment in an F.B.I. wiretap, made public in 2008 at the time of his arrest, when the ex-governor crowed about selling or trading the president-elect’s Senate seat. “I’ve got this thing and it’s [expletive] golden,” he said.

Relying largely on the public record, Coen and Chase tell Blago’s story, from his poor beginnings on the Northwest side to his trial in a courtroom downtown. They ­recount many details of the ex-governor’s eccentricities, including his Elvis obsession and his helmetlike coif, which he would groom with one of nearly a dozen hairbrushes his staff kept on hand. There are also bizarre moments, like the one in which Blago complains that David Axelrod, then his media consultant, has declined to commit to his gubernatorial race because of an impression that Blago lacks “gravitas.”

Nor do Coen and Chase stint on examples of Blago’s incompetence, arrogance and venality. Policies enacted could fill a thimble: “He was showing up at work maybe two to eight hours a week.”

You can tell this book is written for people who live in Crook County — as Chicago’s Cook County is known — instead of those on the coasts, because of its tone of weary resignation. Coen and Chase reside here, after all. But if Chicago is to thrive, the nation needs a more animated book, schooling it not merely in who Blago is but in what he represents: a dysfunctional system threatening the city’s well-being. The real culprits include Chicago’s anemic economy, the crippling legacy of machine politics, the uncompromising unions and the handful of dynasties running the city.

Neil Steinberg’s memoir, “You Were Never in Chicago,” pitches even more indulgently into platitudes. Chicago, he writes, “is a state of mind.” His book’s title comes from a line on a postcard Liebling received from a disgruntled local. Instead of responding in detail to the New Yorker’s complaints, Steinberg, a columnist at The Chicago Sun-Times, argues that payola is both the city’s distinguishing feature and his own. “Some reporters never accept a free lunch; I never turn one down,” he writes.

The book’s plot builds up to Steinberg’s defense for having pulled strings to get his brother a job at the county treasurer’s office. More interesting are the chapters about ordinary people, like “Driving With Ed McElroy,” a portrait of an old-school publicist whose friendship Steinberg describes as “a Chicago kind,” by which he means favors done and returned. Yet a majority of Steinberg’s boilerplate observations prevent “You Were Never in Chicago” from rising above his silly argument for the unique charm of Chicago’s nepotism. And Steinberg seems to think that Chicago’s grungiest corners should be preserved exactly as they are — the grungier the better. “Nelson Algren would vomit” seeing his old neighborhood transformed into chic Wicker Park, Steinberg complains, in a city filled with empty storefronts and vacant lots.

An insider gets close to give you a picture the visitor can’t see. The picture Steinberg, Coen and Chase paint is how living here bullies writers into repeating the same earnest, desperate story. Reading these books, I wondered if women writers would do better. But that question raised another one: Where are the women writers? In a 2009 Granta issue about Chicago, out of 22 writers, four were women; of those, only one — the septuagenarian Marxist poet Anne Winters — was living here at the time. Hey, Granta: There are cutting-edge women writers in the City of Big Shoulders, like Nami Mun and Eula Biss. Don’t let all the tough-guy sentimentalism fool you.

Ex-Chicagoans — whatever their gender — can bring a fresh eye to the city’s problems. Thomas Dyja’s robust cultural history, “The Third Coast,” weaves together the stories of the American artists, styles and ideas that developed in Chicago before and after World War II — the blues, Mies van der Rohe’s Modernist architecture, Gwendolyn Brooks, Richard Wright, and “Kukla, Fran and Ollie.” This tragedy, written with greater wit than the insider accounts, contends that by the mid-’50s the American mass market, which flourished here along with big-name brands like McDonald’s and Schwinn, snuffed out Midwestern geniuses with radical roots.

Dyja, who now lives in New York but grew up in Chicago, still keenly feels the city’s wounds. “The real struggle for America’s future — whether it would be directed by its people or its institutions — took place in postwar Chicago.” This book begins with the death of the architect Louis Sullivan, whose ornate buildings defined the 19th-century Windy City, and then skates from Robert Maynard Hutchins’s University of Chicago to Emmett Till, from Chicago’s notorious housing problems to Nelson Algren’s love affair with Simone de Beauvoir.

Some of this is familiar, but Dyja zooms in on the qualities Chicagoans value and does it better than anyone else I’ve read: informality; the desire to be “regular”; the conviction among artists that “the process was as important as the product.” These attributes created hospitable conditions for such distinctive genres as Modernist architecture, storefront theater, improv comedy, poetry slams, oral history (perfected by the city patron saint Studs Terkel) and outsider art, even as they alienated writers and artists interested in more than functionality and social reform. Saul Bellow complained about the lack of cafes. “There were greasy-spoon cafeterias, one-arm joints, taverns. I never yet heard of a writer who brought his manuscripts into a tavern.”

Like other chroniclers of mid-20th-­century Chicago, Dyja partly blames the 1955 election of Richard J. Daley for the city’s decline. But he goes further, harnessing Daley’s support of segregation and the political machine to Chicago’s cultural disintegration: Playboy’s founding in 1953 not only commercialized sex, it exemplified the city’s shift from a rich, idiosyncratic art lab championing the individual to a place where only the affluent mattered, a city “demolishing . . . what was best about itself.” The city’s former strengths betrayed it. “Democratizing the arts and knowledge was a Faustian bargain: it put them into the marketplace where the market would determine their ‘value.’ ”

Still, Dyja stumbles when he condemns the University of Chicago, which he depicts as “a place where attacking and defending ideas was honored more than analyzing them.” Having studied there, I can say that the university’s ethereal, argumentative commitments provide a welcome relief from the crude trade-school mentality at many other institutions of higher learning. At the same time, I have often wondered if geographical isolation — the campus is seven miles away from downtown, connected by a highway that circumvents the poor neighborhoods in between — breeds myopia even more devastating than that in the rest of the city. Did Milton Friedman ever see the burned-out projects as he sped along Lake Shore Drive?

Dyja’s book ends with the demolition of almost 6,000 buildings, many of them by Louis Sullivan, between 1957 and 1960. (Only 21 of Sullivan’s structures remain.) And Dyja, whose book jacket boasts that Studs Terkel once described him as “a real Chicago boy,” falls victim to a bit of wistfulness too: “Chicago never became the city it could have been.”

So Chicago is not Detroit, not yet. But the city is trapped by its location, its past, and what philosophers would have called its facticity — its limitations, given the circumstances. Boosterism has been perfected here because the reality is too painful to look at. Poor Chicago, indeed.