National characters. From a recent Harper’s: “The U.S. frontier is in the West and its hero is an outlaw; the Canadian frontier is in the North and its hero is a policeman.”
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“Why would anyone want to be mayor of Chicago?” writes Ann Seng, president of the Chicago Council on Urban Affairs, in One City (March/April 1989). “The problems and issues facing our city…should be enough to scare off all but the brightest, the best, the most articulate, the most dynamic, the most experienced, the most innovative and the most committed-to-our-city candidates. You be the judge if this is the situation in which we find ourselves.”
Business services, health services, and restaurants and bars are the biggest business sectors in Chicago these days, according to the 1988 annual report of the city’s Econo-mic Development Commission. In those three sectors 11,872 firms employ 246,253 workers–more than the next six largest sectors in the city put together (banking, wholesale durables, insurance, educational services, printing and publishing, and air transportation).
Maybe the potholes are bigger than they were four years ago. In 1984 the Illinois Department of Transportation improved 1,947 miles of highway (out of a total of just over 17,000 miles), and in 1988, just 912 miles. Yet according to state comptroller Roland Burris, total road-funds expenditures were slightly higher in 1988, and the available month-end balances in the funds averaged three times higher in 1988 than four years earlier (State of Illinois Fiscal Condition Report, February 28, 1989).
