Sidewalks - Portraits of Chicago

Few people know Chicago as do Rick Kogan and Charles Osgood, and their "Sidewalks" column for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine is a tour of the city like no other, taking readers to the off-beat and quintessential spots that give Chicago its character--that make its inhabitants feel at home and tell its visitors that they have arrived. Accompanied by evocative color photographs by Charles Osgood, Kogan's pieces revisit the lost places and people of Chicago, and take readers down the quiet byways and thriving thoroughfares, pointing out the characters and cornerstones, the oddities and institutions that make the city what it is. In this collection you will find an elegy for Maxwell Street, the marketplace that pulsed with city life for more than 100 years; a remembrance of a disturbing advertisement ("Are you a slave to housework?") on the side of a building on Irving Park Road; a cross marking a deadly intersection; a magical miniature golf course; as well as ballad singer Fred Holstein, the denizens of the World Gym and memories of Bensinger's pool hall, the day-camp kids of summer, bike couriers, the creatures of the beach, and much, much more. Here is Chicago, past, present, and--let's hope--future, captured in the unique archive of Sidewalks.

"When Rick Kogan and Charles Osgood take a detour to one of Chicago's sidewalks, they're telling us about the city's true main streets, where people work and live and love and dream and express themselves in a uniquely Chicago way. Kogan and Osgood are journalists, but they are also poets. Their stories are the stories of a great city captured at a certain moment in time. This is an instant treasure." --Richard Roeper

"Of course, the sidewalk is the heart side of all great cities. It is here where the anonymous millions--those who make the city work--run, amble, play, jump, hop, and breathe. Of course, it calls upon our most gifted and insightful of journalists, Rick Kogan, with his magic words, and Charlie Osgood, with his gimlet eye, to do the trick. And how they do it! Sidewalks is a wonderful book that tells you the basic truths of our city, Chicago. Six thumbs up, including mine." --Studs Terkel

"What a perfect combination, Rick Kogan and Charles Osgood! Who tells better stories than Rick? And who sees for us better than Charles? Again, what a perfect combination!" --Victor Skrebneski