It's a Tall World, After All

By CALVIN TRILLIN

To the people in Chicago who are intent on catching up with Kuala Lumpur I say, "Please, stop." I'm referring, of course, to the competition among cities to have the tallest building in the world. A few years ago the Malaysians erected twin towers that were 33 ft. higher than Chicago's Sears Tower, which had been the world's tallest building for more than 20 years. I realize that this was a serious provocation. A lot of Chicagoans have always been mildly offended by A.J. Liebling's description of Chicago as the Second City, after all, and even Liebling didn't have in mind being second to Kuala Lumpur.

As if that weren't bad enough, Atlanta claims to have surpassed Chicago as the city with the busiest airport. Chicago's O'Hare airport still has more planes landing and taking off than any other airport--as a frequent visitor to O'Hare, often for longer than I'd intended to stay, I have grown to suspect that a lot more land than take off--but Hartsfield International handles more passengers.

Now Chicago shows signs of fighting back. The city council has approved a zoning change for a building in the Loop that would be 67 ft. higher than the towers in Kuala Lumpur. For all I know, the airport authority is secretly figuring out how to jam enough additional passengers into O'Hare to pass up Atlanta, even if some software drummers trying to make connections get crushed like bugs in the process.

As a longtime admirer of Chicago, I can only hope that cooler heads prevail. Atlanta, which is to boosterism what Las Vegas is to ATM machines, has been playing catch-up ball for years. It's just the sort of place that would boast about having the busiest airport, which seems a bit like boasting about having the world's largest traffic jam. Asian cities like Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong and Shanghai have become Atlanta. Eager to call attention to their commercial muscle, they all have tallest-building projects. They're like a family that moves into a fancy neighborhood for the first time and feels the need to display in its driveway the most expensive luxury sedan on the block.

Does Chicago have the fortitude to keep its cars in the garage? I think so. The last time I was there, literally hundreds of nearly life-size fiber-glass cows, each decorated by a different artist, were displayed on the sidewalks of Michigan Boulevard. Given the traditional cattle sensitivity of Midwestern boosters afraid of having their cities dismissed as cow towns, I told my hosts that a city in Illinois that festoons its most elegant shopping area with bovine creatures is not lacking in the self-confidence department.

Which is why, I told them, that Chicago should not trouble itself to get into a height fight or a passenger race with the likes of Kuala Lumpur or Atlanta. It is, after all, the City of Big Shoulders, the Second City. Somebody reminded me that if Liebling were writing now, he'd have to call Chicago the Third City; Los Angeles has more people. Does that mean that some Chicago booster is concocting a scheme to annex Moline and move its population to the Loop? If so, please, stop.