A British crime novel, ”Bodies,” published in 1986, has a scene in which a distraught father explains to a detective why the father had not objected when his son accepted a job in a dangerous section of contemporary London. The son had been murdered.
”I never thought for a moment of warning him,” the father says.
”I knew he was going to Soho, but it`s not as though Soho`s Chicago these days, is it?”
Although a half century has passed since the rattle of death-dealing machine guns died on Chicago`s streets, the city`s image as a lair of trigger- happy mobsters lives in the minds of many people in other countries.
The Capone-era bullets are gone, but the violent image could be deadly to Chicago`s efforts to grow as a world-class city. The image is so persistent that some promotion-minded Chicagoans are saying it`s time to face reality and make the most of the gangster past.
As Chicago leans increasingly on tourism and a burgeoning hospitality industry for economic survival, businesspeople and civic leaders want Chicago to show itself in some light, if not a better light.
”If the world perception of Chicago is gangsterism, we should take that negative and make it into a positive,” says Patrick F. Daly, an architect and developer who is vice chairman of the board of McCormick Place.
”We should establish a museum dedicated to that time,” Daly says.
”When people recognize it as history, it will just become quaint.
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”We should acknowledge that, yes, it existed, and it`s over. If people want to know about it, we should say, `You`re welcome to come and see it, and while you`re here you should see the rest of the city and judge it on its merits. We should have the museum to memorialize the gangsterism as something that was part of our past, but not of our present and certainly not of our future.”
The key, say many travel officials, is to get tourists here for whatever reason. The city itself will take care of the rest, they say.
”I thought of Chicago as the stockyards, the windy city, Al Capone and the 1968 Democratic convention,” said Manfred Nissen, president and chief executive of Swissair Nestle Swissotel Ltd. Nissen flew in from Zurich last month to oversee some of the last stages of the opening of the Swiss Grand Hotel. Luring foreign tourists to Chicago has become particularly important to Nissen.
Until Nissen took over at Swissotel a year ago, he says, he was among the many Europeans who view American culture as confined mainly to the coasts.
A few trips here have shown him that the city offers substantial lures for the high-end hotel guests and restaurant patrons on which his company depends.
”The restaurants in Chicago are outstanding,” Nissen said. ”We`re going to have to do a good job to compete here.”
The city`s image of gloom and doom is unjustified, he says.
”People I know who have come here for the first time have absolutely fallen in love with Chicago,” he said. ”Chicago has good-looking people, beautifully dressed. I went out with some friends on a Sunday night; New York is not as lively.”
Most of the city`s good points are not well known, Nissen says.
”We`re going to have to sell Chicago,” Nissen said. ”We`re going to have to really show that it is elegant, pretty, with good walking, good shopping. We can sell Chicago as an international destination, on a level with Boston and New York (where the company has other hotels) and other cities.”
Another foreign businessman whose travels have let him see the light in America`s heartland is Wolfgang Driller, vice president of Kempinski AG, based in Frankfurt, West Germany. The company`s $45 million Hotel 21 East opened in June on East Bellevue Place.
”New York will always be first,” Driller said, ”(just) as Rome or Paris or Athens are the first places to go in their countries. But I have been to Chicago eight or nine times, and I like it better than New York. It`s very clean. You know where to go. You have Michigan Avenue. I like the State of Illinois Building. The only thing not to come to Chicago for is the weather in wintertime.”
Until five years ago, Chicago`s image abroad ”used to be of the `30s,”
but it is improving, Driller said.
”The Chicago Symphony did a very good job (on its foreign tours). Your architecture is very famous. People know about the Art Institute. Last year I attended the International Art Fair here. For me it was very impressive. The area on the Near North Side, where there are lofts and studios for painters, it`s the same as in German cities such as Hamburg. The rehabilitation and reuse of buildings. These things give the city an image.”
While Chicago continues to lag among foreign tourists in comparison to the number who visit coastal cities, people who come here on business tend to spread the positive word when they go home.
Egyptian officials visited McCormick Place recently to learn the secrets of its success. They found, to their surprise, that there are other reasons to come to Chicago than conventions, trade shows and corporate meetings.
”Every place has an image,” said Nadia Ibrahim, director general of the Ministry of Tourism`s offices in Alexandria.
”If I say I`m from Egypt, the first thing that comes to mind is pyramids, crocodiles and camels,” she said. ”If you tell an Egyptian you`re from Chicago, the first thing he thinks of is gangsters and guns.”
She and her colleagues wondered why Chicago is promoted only as a convention site and not to tourists.
”The lake, it`s so nice,” Ibrahim said. ”It can be a tourist attraction.”
Unlike Chicago, New York has undergone a transformation in the eyes of Egyptians.
”New York used to have a very bad image,” said Nahed Gad, director of a Cairo office that promotes conferences in Egypt.
”In the `60s and `70s, New York was also gangsters, shooting, handbag snatchers, stabbing,” Gad said.
That was changed largely by New York`s ”I Love New York” promotional campaign, she said.
”New York was so aggressive in their campaign all over the world, to the extent it reached even the ordinary person.”
Toshiro Natsume, editor of the Shizuoka Shimbun newspaper in Japan, says 80 percent of Japanese could point to Chicago on a map, but few long to come here.
They would rather go to New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Youngsters in junior high school learn that Chicago is a large industrial city, he said. From television movies they get the impression of gangsters.
On arriving here he was pleasantly surprised.
”There`s plenty of green,” he said. ”It`s a clean, beautiful city. Modern architecture and ancient styles of buildings are together here.”
Few Mexican tourists want to visit Chicago, says Guadalupe Pineda, international editor of El Universal, Mexico`s second-largest newspaper.
”But everybody wants to go to New York at least once. It`s thought of as a mythological place. And Washington, D.C., is very popular.”
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Though ”The Untouchables” television program is popular in Mexico, Pineda came to Chicago with no preconceived ideas, she says.
Though disappointed by New York, she was pleasantly surprised by Chicago. ”Chicago is a nice place to live and to work. You have the lake. The city is organized, not too crowded. The houses in Lincoln Park are
beautiful.”
For most people in foreign lands, however, the image of Chicago seems to be vague, if not sinister.
American journalists in Africa and South America often find that the gangland image is the only thing many people know about the city.
The common response to mention of Chicago is to raise one`s arms and pretend to be firing a machine gun. Europeans, on the other hand, often identify the city more with the late Mayor Richard Daley and machine politics than with anything else.
Among the educated elite in South America, though, many not only know about Chicago but have studied here or know about fine educational
institutions in the Midwest.
In Chile, some of the senior government economists who studied at the University of Chicago are known, fondly or not, as ”the Chicago Boys.”
In the Soviet Union, the image of Chicago, like most things having to do with public policy and perceptions, is undergoing a bit of perestroika
(restructuring). Because of films, books and TV-plus an all-pervasive information apparatus that depicted the city as Gomorrah-on-the-lake-most Soviets cling to visions of Chicago as a toddlin` town of gun-toting mobsters, ballot-stuffing politicians and hippie-bashing policemen.
Many Soviets are well grounded in American literature, however, and are admirers of the Chicago school of urban fiction and poetry. Younger Soviets know the city as an exciting nurturing spot for the blues.
For Parisians, Chicago is thought to lack a certain chic.
”People in Paris look for a fashionable destination: New York, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo,” said Pierre Charbonneau, a Paris travel agent.
”Chicago, for the moment, is not in the package,” he said. The city lacks a ”cliche,” a certain attraction that travelers will seek out.
”New York is known to have things like the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and the Guggenheim (art museum). Los Angeles has Venice Beach and Hollywood.”
The city`s macho image has its attraction, though. In the Ivory Coast, a small, off-the-beaten-track restaurant is called the Maquis Chicago. The owner named it that because, he said, Chicago ”is a big country that has a lot of money. It is a powerful place. We hope this is a powerful restaurant.”
Many Italians revere Chicago`s musical history and architecture. However, a recent newspaper series detailing the rise in Rome`s crime rate was headlined comfortingly, ”But we are not Chicago.”