City still holds promise for many

I want to challenge the Tribune Editorial Board’s use of “downward spiral” in a recent editorial (“The alarming downward spiral of downtown Chicago,” Sept. 13). Chicago has overcome many disasters over 150 years and has moved forward, through fire, flu, economic depression, wars and the racial crisis of 1968, though we are still working through that painful period. I don’t accept that Chicagoans will be crushed by current fears and anxiety over COVID-19, economic failures, protests, crime or political dissension.

Somewhat late in life, I have come to understand a personal experience in relation to at least one aspect of the city. When I was a student at Chicago’s Senn High School around 1949-50, I had a summer job at the gas company’s offices on Michigan Avenue. With my red pencil, I transferred numbers from gas meter installers’ tallies to punch cards; many thousands of those cards sat in boxes before me, waiting to be entered into the computer.

As a North Sider, I wasn’t familiar with many of those South Side street names. but I did notice that a single apartment address could hold five, or more, new gas meters. Over and over again that summer, housing was crowding up, almost room by room. Now, in retrospect, I see this as evidence of the “Great Migration,” and, in spite of many difficulties, people still kept coming.

That was 70 years ago. Many more housing options in the city and suburbs exist now for everyone, though the residue of discrimination lingers. I was reminded of a better and more hopeful vision of Chicagoland from a longtime friend I met in the 1960s in church. Hazel was part of that migration, and while she has moved back to Arkansas, in a recent letter, she writes that she still views Chicago and Maywood as “the Promised Land.” Those are the words of a woman who was glad to come North, and loves Chicago as I do. — Nancy I. Hiestand, Oak Park, formerly of Chicago