Here’s the Deal

Here's the Deal is a hard-hitting study of how ambition and greed are leading our cities to disaster. Before there was a Ground Zero in New York City, Block 37 was a giant hole in the heart of a great American city. In 1990, Chicago's Block 37 (as a key part of a 27 acre urban renewal project) was razed to the ground. After the expenditure of nearly $250 million of public and private capital, nothing has been built on this once vital and densely-occupied city block. This stubborn vacancy at the center of Chicago's historic downtown eerily presaged the post 9/11 wasteland in Lower Manhattan. By exploring one American urban block in meticulous detail, Ross Miller clarifies the opaque process that continually breaks and remakes our most vital cities. Here's the Deal is a thrilling true-life story of back room deals and political promises. Told throughout with the scrupulousness of serious scholarship and the excitement of a novel, Here's the Deal is already considered a modern classic of urban literature.

"Longtime Chicagoans are not easily scandalized by reports of corruption, but Here's the Deal leaves me goggle-eyed." -- Saul Bellow

"Ross Miller's Here's the Deal is even more of an American apocalypse than his earlier book on the great fire of Chicago. It is nothing less than an authentic vision of the destruction of the paradigm of all America's inner cities." --Harold Bloom

"Smart, wise, funny ... Here's the Deal is a representative urban tragedy against which the best revenge ... is a high-spirited recounting." --Nicholas Lemann