Quotes by Pat Colander

Big plans, elaborate schemes and grand designs sort of messily bleeding into one another have created Chicago's reputation for rawness. But that rawness is just ambition-sometimes ambition run amuck-that has acquired a life of its own.

Chicago is a city of contradictions, of private visions haphazardly overlaid and linked together. If the city was unhappy with itself yesterday-and invariably it was-it will reinvent itself today.

In Chicago, we may not think the Picasso presiding over the Richard J. Daley Center plaza is art, but we know it's a big Picasso and it's the city's Picasso, and when the Cubs made the play-offs, the sculpture wore a baseball cap just like everything else.

Nor is it out of character that Chicago's grandest achievement- a largely manmade arc of lakefront parks and beaches - began as a mistake. from waste thrown into Lake Michigan a 75-year-old dump.