Issue link: http://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/52531
in Hawaii," Obama told his audience at a city fundraiser earlier this year. "But I became a man here in Chicago." When he left for Harvard Law School, the newly seasoned activist told his neighbours and colleagues that he would be back, to seek a career "in public life". When he did return, he prefaced his political career by marrying Michelle Robinson, a lawyer and South Side native, and teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Having had a future president on the faculty of its law school is just one of many points of pride for the university. Along with a long roster of Nobel Prize winners, it can claim a founding role in the monetarist Chicago School of Economics; and the first sustained nuclear reaction, accomplished in a converted squash court in the early days of World War Two. At the same time Barack Obama was learning neighbourhood-level politics as a community organiser, a 29-year-old television personality, little known beyond her East Coast audience, was hired to host a morning talk show in Chicago. "I set foot in this city, and just walking down the street, it was like roots, like the motherland," Oprah Winfrey has recalled of her arrival in September 1983. "I knew I belonged here." Oprah has belonged ever since, keeping Chicago as her primary home and the headquarters of her Harpo multimedia production company. Chicago, the 'city that works', has never been timid about flaunting its energy, drive and a healthy sense of its own importance. Contending first with New York and, later, Los Angeles for prominence in the American civic firmament (the city lost second place to LA in the 1980s, and now has Houston, Texas nipping at its heels), Chicago has always worked hard at self promotion. Its opening volley was the World's Colombian Exposition of 1893, a world's fair ostensibly held to commemorate – a year late – the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of America. But for local boosters, it was a celebration of Chicago's own spectacular rise from the ashes of 1871. At the Exposition's heart was a 'White City' of stuccoed neoclassical exhibit halls, designed under the supervision of Daniel Burnham as one of his greatest Big Plans. While travel&living 77 OPPOSITE The University of Chicago campus in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago where President Barack Obama was a professor and has a home. CLOCKWISE, TOP LEFT Blue Chicago blues club; A sculpture called Agora in Millenium Park in Chicago; Historic Navy Pier is Chicago's lakefront playground. And it's the Midwest's number one tourist and leisure destination, attracting more than 8.6 million visitors a year.