In this week’s New Yorker, fashion- and humor-writer Patricia Marx takes her sassy style column to Chicago. Of course I was excited to read it, hoping it would cement my Chicago-New York complex and prove to those pesky New Yorkers that their city may have more words in its name, but that doesn’t make it any better.
Marx’s articles in the fashion issues of the New Yorker are usually witty, entertaining, and pleasant to read in terms of both pace and subject matter. But relocating to Chicago seems to have taken a toll on her writing. There’s still wit and sass, and there’s some smart social-urban commentary too. But the article is, for the most part, vapid and shallow. It seems Marx is dependent on being in the center of the universe, where she doesn’t have to deal with Chicago’s 237 neighborhoods and the Great Lake everyone thinks is a pond.
The lede is promising:
A New Yorker goes to Chicago with her high hat on. Too inland, too friendly, the kind of place your accountant’s best friend comes from and where soybean futures are traded, she thinks. The big city that isn’t. Of course, everything she knows about the place comes from changing planes at O’Hare: it has too much weather [sic]; it’s too hublike (the congested gateway to where she really wants to go); and there’s too much deep-dish pizza.
I was willing to take some insults, given what seemed to be harmless sarcasm. “The big city that isn’t” works because Marx’s character only knows Chicago from O’Hare—the airport that’s not even in the city itself (for that you’ll have to visit the much more pleasant Midway).
The next few paragraphs are ok too; Marx derides the city using quotes from New Jerseyans, brings up its Second city nickname. But she goes on to list some of the firsts that happened in the city: skyscraper, interracial hospital, Ferris wheel, modern planetarium.
The article takes a turn for the worse when Marx brings up Chicago’s sales tax—10.5 percent. It’s the highest in the country, Marx complains. I, too, complain. But for once, Ms. Marx, can you complain about New York’s prices, that even given Chicago’s absurd sales tax, shopping in New York is still more expensive?
She later cites winter temperature differences between Chicago and New York—the most drastic of which is a mere ten-degree separation.
I liked learning about Ultimo. But there’s more to Oak Street than Ultimo, there’s more to downtown than Oak Street, and there’s more to the North Side than downtown.
When Marx marvels at Chicago’s cleanliness, it’s impossible for a Chicagoan not to smirk and laugh:
Wherever you go, Chicago seems to be spic and span. Residents keep their trash cans in back alleys, not on the street.
