The City That No Longer Works

Chicago is struck, strained and strife-ridden

Their city has always been a scrappy place, even brutish, and Chicagoans tend to take a perverse pride in its streetwise, tough-guy posture. Lately, however, even diehard Chicago chauvinists are admitting that the chronic battles-economic, racial, political-may be getting out of hand. Last week the city's school system, third largest in the U.S. with 430,000 students, was shut down by a teachers' strike, the second in two years. Black and Hispanic youth gangs have kept up their amazing homicidal pace, killing six people in the two weeks since...

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