We all know the cliches. Los Angelenos want only sunshine, sand and blond hair. New Yorkers are happiest when they have manic energy, stress and perfect bagels. People from both cities think of Chicago only as a place to change planes as they’re flying from one coast to the other. No wonder Chicagoans are insecure about living in the Second (or is it Third?) City. Still, every year a few thousand people from New York and L.A. move to Chicago and find they want never to leave.
The Magazine spoke with six people–three from each coast–who have moved to Chicago and fallen in love with this city. Much of what they say is no surprise. Los Angelenos hate the cold and love that everything in Chicago is close together. New Yorkers miss their rich cultural treasures, but can’t believe how cheap the housing is. All six, from both cities, prefer Chicago’s people.
“I thought they were so rude,” said L.A.’s Claudia Morales, “until I realized they were just being real and honest.” The New Yorkers, of course, never thought Chicagoans were rude at all.
These immigrants to Chicago also said some surprising things. For some, Chicago is a place to escape ethnic stereotypes and total segregation. For others, Chicago offers artistic and business freedoms that the more competitive coasts never would allow.
The immigrants paint a picture of Chicago as a city that is easy and fun to live in, a better place to raise a family and build a career. Its delights–the Loop, the lake, theaters, museums, bars and restaurants–are near one another and so affordable. These Chicagoans, save one, never will leave.
CLAUDIA MORALES, LOS ANGELES
Claudia Morales, 27, has learned a new pride in her Latino heritage since she moved to Chicago a year ago. So many of the Hispanic kids she grew up with in Los Angeles were cholos, gangbangers.
“I never had many friends in those neighborhoods,” she said.
Morales’ family left Guatemala when Claudia was 6. They moved often throughout the largely Latino areas of East and West L.A. There were times she was able to live a typical L.A. life–swimming at the beach, giggling with her friends on Hollywood Boulevard, going on dates to Magic Mountain. That ended when she dropped out of high school and worked at a shoe store to support her single mother and two younger brothers.
Morales did go back to school and became a certified domestic violence counselor, working at several shelters and for the L.A. city attorney as a battered women’s court advocate. She enjoyed her work, but “I never liked California,” she said. “I always thought there was something better out there. I have always thought big, because I was always poor. And I knew I would only succeed somewhere else.”
In 1995, her mother and teenage brothers moved one more time, this time to Chicago, where they could be safer from the cholos. After a lonely year, Morales moved here in January 1997. Her first impression was harsh.
“I had never seen trees without leaves,” she said. “And it was so cold. My head hurt. My bones hurt.”
Morales is now the community educator for a battered women’s advocacy program, Mujeres Latinas en Accion, Latin Women in Action, and is very happy with Chicago.
“The falling leaves and the snow are so beautiful,” she said. “I feel my Latino culture is much richer here. There are so many festivals, not just Mexican Cinco de Mayo, but Colombian, Dominican, Guatemalan, Puerto Rican parades. And I have found proud, strong Latin women.”
BILL BRODSKY, NEW YORK
For Bill Brodsky, Chicago is a better place to find innovation and sophistication than his native New York. As a child, he often visited his father, a distinguished securities lawyer, at the brokerage firms and trading floors of New York’s Wall Street. There was never much question that Brodsky would spend the rest of his life working in New York’s financial district.
In spring 1973, the world’s securities industry–and Bill Brodsky’s life–changed. A few Chicago stock traders developed a system for investors to make money and lessen risk by buying and selling stock options. What would become a multibillion-dollar business could happen only in Chicago, Brodsky said: “New Yorkers were just too stuck in their ways.”
By then, Brodsky was a young attorney at a Wall Street firm. Most of his colleagues thought this new options business was certain to fail. “They thought nothing innovative could come out of Chicago,” he said, laughing. Brodsky thought differently and wrote an article that celebrated this new industry for the Review of Securities Regulation, a New York legal publication. Within months, the Chicago Board Options Exchange was thriving and, “The American Stock Exchange was scared to death,” Brodsky said. “They hired me to learn all about this new business.”
Brodsky’s job brought him to Chicago every other month. “I would go home and tell Joan, my wife, `You’d love it,’ ” he said. But he would never have thought of moving here. “It was a terrible New York arrogance.”
In the summer of 1982, Brodsky was offered the chief operating officer position at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. “If the job were in New York, I would have taken it in a minute,” he said. “But it became a gut-wrenching decision. We didn’t want to leave New York.”
Moving to Chicago was a sacrifice for the sake of a job. But no longer. “We’d never leave,” said Brodsky, 54, now the chairman and CEO of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. “Chicago has a real Second City mentality,” he said. “I say, `You’re crazy. You don’t know how good you have it. You’ve never been stuck on the Long Island Expressway for two hours moving at 5 miles an hour. I’ve had several major job offers in New York. I’d never leave Chicago.”
MIKI DASH, NEW YORK
Miki Dash, 38, is moving back to the New York area, after 20 years in Chicago. She grew up in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, staring at the Manhattan skyline from a middle-class high-rise. Dash spent much of her childhood riding her bicycle across one bridge or another to find a handball game in Manhattan. “You would just go to a park and say, `I’ve got next,’ ” she said.
Handball is the center of a New York subculture that brings together people from different ages and ethnic groups in parks all over the city. “In New York, everyone interacts with everyone else,” said Dash, an African-American of Caribbean descent. “My next-door neighbors were from Hong Kong. Their food was nothing like what I ate in Chinese restaurants. My other neighbor was a Peruvian fisherman. I grew up with Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews, blacks, whites, everything. New York has . . . more common places to interact than Chicago does.”
“Chicago is a great city, an American city,” she said. “New York is an international city. When I first got here, to go to Northwestern, people thought I spoke funny. I came from New York, where everyone had an accent. I never thought of any one person as speaking funny.”
Dash has stayed in Chicago, as a market analyst for 3Com Corp.’s U.S. Robotics division.
“The quality of life is much better here,” she said. “Housing is much cheaper, it’s easier to get around. The cultural life is just enough–not as good as New York, but enough. And blacks do better here. There are more black homeowners, more business owners. There are just more black people here, proportionally.”
Nevertheless, Dash has decided, after two full decades, to move back East. “I need my edge back,” she said. “I want more new, new, new. I need to be stimulated more. I’ve experienced a lot that Chicago has and I love it here. Don’t say I don’t love it. But I’m ready to take New York on a more sophisticated level. You know, you just start dressing better in New York. I’m not a fashion nut, but everyone just starts dressing better.”
STEVE KERR, LOS ANGELES
Steve Kerr remembers why he wants to spend the rest of his life in Chicago every time he goes to a restaurant. The 32-year-old Chicago Bulls guard grew up in Los Angeles where dining “is a big performance. Los Angeles is filled with people who are trying to make it,” he said, tugging at a sweatshirt tossed over blue jeans. “It’s not my style. In Chicago I can wear this. Chicagoans are unpretentious. You can just go out and eat.”
Kerr grew up in Pacific Palisades, an L.A. suburb of carefully manicured lawns and large homes. It’s a lot like Lake Forest, where he and his wife, Margot, are raising their children, Nicholas and Madeleine. For all the physical similarities of Pacific Palisades and Lake Forest, Kerr far prefers the people of Chicago.
“They’re Midwesterners; that means they’re real,” he said. “People have big families here and take that seriously.”
Kerr spoke of his days as an unspectacular journeyman player before he joined the Chicago Bulls in 1993. In Chicago his playing and popularity have soared.
“A big part of that success has been the fans,” he said. “Chicago is one of the only cities where sports players can become a part of the city’s life off the court. I speak at corporate events, for charity, in the schools. People have taken to me. And I feel that support when I play.”
It’s not just the people. “Everything is easier here,” he said. “It’s a real city. L.A. isn’t. It’s an agglomeration of areas. You have to drive for hours to get anywhere. In Chicago, I can just drive downtown and go out to eat, take my kids to Navy Pier, the Children’s Museum, Broadway shows. There are no hassles.”
Kerr does so much in Chicago “because it’s so cold,” he said. “In L.A., it’s so warm I was outside all the time, playing basketball.”
For all its warmth, would he ever think of moving back to Los Angeles?
“Never,” he said quickly and with a smile.
KEN HAMADA, LOS ANGELES
Ken Hamada, 48, grew up in a hobbled-together wooden shack in a field in Dominguez, Calif., a Los Angeles suburb.
“The bathroom was outdoors,” he said. “When it would rain, my father (a gardener) put planks down on the earth.”
In Hamada’s Los Angeles, no one was trying to make it big in the movies. His parents had lost all they owned during the time of the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans.
“I wanted to be surfing, but my weekends were spent working with my dad, and studying,” Hamada said. In Dominguez and later in Torrance, Hamada’s family socialized only with other Japanese-Americans.
Hamada’s life in Chicago bears little resemblance to his childhood. He went to Northwestern University Dental School; married a Japanese-American woman, Peggy; established a dental practice; and is raising three children, John, Katie and Mark, in Schaumburg. Hamada is well-acquainted with his neighbors; none are Japanese-Americans.
“My kids don’t know they’re Japanese,” he said. “They think they’re white. They don’t have any Japanese friends.”
Every other Sunday, Hamada and his family go to the Midwest Buddhist Temple. “We’re not religious,” he said. “But that’s our only contact with our heritage. I want to give the kids a sense of our ethnic background.”
DOUG HARA, NEW YORK
Doug Hara, 29, does not want to hear it again. His friends from New York drive him crazy. “I don’t have any desire to move back to Manhattan,” he said. “Why would I leave Chicago? I have a beautiful coach house with two floors. With the same money in New York, I’d have some one-room studio where I’d have to step over dead people just to get in the building.”
Cheaper housing is no small matter. Hara is a member of Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company, which has won praise for productions that include “The Arabian Nights.”
“We could never survive in New York,” he said. “We couldn’t afford to rent a theater. None of the actors could afford to live there. Our aesthetic might work in New York City, but we’d never be able to find out.”
Hara came to the Chicago area when he was 18, in 1987, to study acting at Northwestern University. He already had appeared on Broadway and had an Actors Equity card. Rather than return to a promising career in his home city, Hara always knew he would stay.
“I am so excited to create my own theater as part of a company,” Hara said. “In New York and L.A., there’s not a lot of theater for theater’s sake. They are concerned with making a big splash, not in creating something worthwhile. It takes a lot of drive to succeed on the coasts; that’s not my style. Chicago theater will never be a vehicle to take over the world, to get on the cover of Time magazine. But that gives Chicago artists a freedom; they’re less paranoid.”
Hara would like to be cast in L.A.-based television and movie roles. This year, he will spend three months there, auditioning. If cast, he plans to commute to the coast. He and his fiance, Kirstin Showalter, plan to buy a house in Chicago this year.
