One hundred and ten years later, Chicagoans point with pride to new condos springing up downtown in towering skyscrapers as a sign of urban rebirth. But Chicagoans’ love for the new is mixed with a nostalgia and a conservatism. A great hue and cry went up over the futuristic redesign and expansion of Soldier Field, scheduled for completion in September. While the $632 million project calls for the preservation of Soldier Field’s historic, classical 1924 exterior, the new modern interior rising above it has attracted much criticism.

Chicago’s split personality is apparent in the commerce it has attracted recently, too. The city does double duty as headquarters for old-economy stalwarts such as The Quaker Oats Company and new economy upstarts such as Orbitz. Over the last four years both companies decided to make Chicago their base.

Site Selection Magazine recently ranked Chicago as the top metro area in the U.S. for business development. Boeing made headlines when it chose to relocate to Chicago from Seattle in 2001, no doubt nudged by a $63 million city and state incentive package. Also benefiting from city and state incentives, Solo Cup is building a new $100 million, one million-square foot factory on Chicago’s South Side.

“In general it’s a pro-business environment. Chicago has access to markets both globally and nationally and infrastructure that support that—rail, road, air and telecommunications,” says Glen Marker, director of research for World Business Chicago (http://www.worldbusinesschicago.com), a not-for-profit economic development corporation and public-private partnership that promotes the Chicago region internationally as a business location.

Earlier this year, Moody’s Investors Services ranked Chicago the country’s most diverse economy in terms of industries. Chicago’s GRP for manufacturing is the largest in the country at $59 billion a year in 2000, and the total GRP for the Chicago metro area was $349 billion in 2001, higher than the GRP of Russia.

Those key industries include the manufacture of food, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, rubber and plastics, industrial and commercial machinery, electronic components, as well as printing and publishing. Chicago is also home to the nation’s largest business service industry. Key players are financial and legal services, insurance and real estate. Other important industries include computer systems design, accounting, auditing, consulting, engineering, software development, human resources management, architecture, commercial research, advertising and public relations.

Long known as “the city that works” for its strong manufacturing base, it’s also the city that thinks, home to no less than 101 higher education institutions. “In downtown Chicago and surrounding neighborhoods, the number of people with bachelor’s degrees is 2.5 times the national average, and the number with postgraduate is 3.2 times the national average,” says Marker.

While clearly affected by the recession, having lost some 57,000 jobs in 2002, the Chicago region is not as bad off as some major metropolitan areas, contends Marker. “People were saying we had the largest job loss in the country. While we had the largest aggregate number of jobs lost, it was only 1.4 percent of our economy. There are 4.17 million workers in the Chicago metro area. What’s important about the labor pool is that its size and scale helps to keep down costs. It’s an exceptionally diverse labor pool.”

Emerging industries in the region include nanotech and biotech. A significant amount of advanced telecommunications research is being done in Chicago involving photonic networks, fiber-optic networks designed to pump up bandwidth.

“Large-scale international companies are doing this type of research in Chicago. They’re here because the talent is here. And the reason the talent is here has a lot to do with history,” explains Marker. Long a major crossroads of rail and highways, as telecommunications followed those routes, Chicago also became the nexus for its infrastructure.

Nearly 500 companies operate R&D facilities in the Chicago metro area. R&D facilities include Argonne National Lab, Fermi Lab, Northwestern University Center of Nanotechnology and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications. Plans are also in the works for the Wrigley Innovation Center, an $84 million, 300,000-square-foot research and production complex on Chicago’s Goose Island.

Chicago’s tourism industry is slowly recovering from the effects of 9/11. Hotel occupancy figures were up this year, running at an average of 59.9 percent from January to April 2003 compared to 56.7 percent for the January to April 2002 period, and edging close to the pre-9/11 figure of 60.5 percent for the same period in 2001.

Chicago has added about 2,000 hotel rooms since 2000, and more accommodations are in the works, including the Hard Rock Hotel scheduled to open first quarter 2004 in the historic Carbon and Carbide Building. McCormick Place’s expansion, scheduled for completion in 2007, will add 300,000 square feet of exhibition space and 200,000 square feet of meeting space. The overhaul of lower and upper Wacker Drive wrapped up in 2002, smoothing traffic flow.

However, the future of Chicago’s air traffic flow is less clear. Earlier this year, when Mayor Daley closed Meigs Field for what he termed “homeland security” reasons, critics protested loudly, and the FAA expressed concerns that the closure would put added pressure on O’Hare and Midway airports. Midway’s expansion is scheduled for completion next year, but as Business Traveler went to press, O’Hare’s controversial $6.6 billion expansion was on hold.