THE OUTSIDER
LORI LIGHTFOOT FIRST SET EYES ON THE CITY she now governs when she was an 18-year-old freshman at the University of Michigan. It was St. Patrick’s Day 1981. A dorm mate from Chicago was bragging about how the city dyed its river green. Bullshit, thought Lightfoot, a no-nonsense type even as a teenager. But when another classmate from her dorm offered to drive — a guy nicknamed Adam Ant for his resemblance to the new wave singer — she agreed to join the road trip.
A small-town girl from Massillon, Ohio, a steel-making town of 30,000, Lightfoot had never seen a city bigger than Cleveland, which had exactly two tall buildings. As the car approached the Skyway, Lightfoot remembers, she felt outraged at having to pay a toll. What kind of city charges admission? But then, as the car crested the peak of the elevated highway, Lightfoot saw the Chicago skyline, dozens of aspiring towers clustered at the edge of the glittering lake.
“You look out into this thing, it’s like something from a movie into the future, looking at this megalopolis,” she recalls. “It was kind of mind-blowing. Then we drove along the lake, which was also magnificent. I’d just never experienced anything like this. My friend’s parents lived on the North Side. I think her mother made us a little dinner, and we were out on the street, which was pretty amazing.” The dorm mates spent the night at the Sheridan Chase, a rundown motel in Rogers Park. The next day, Lightfoot watched the parade, verified that the river was, in fact, green, then drove back to Ann Arbor.
When she next returned to Chicago, five years later, it was to interview at the University of Chicago Law School. This time, Lightfoot was thinking of Chicago as a place to settle down and make a career. She wanted to live in a big city, but one that wasn’t too far away from her aging parents. For a young, ambitious, family-oriented Midwesterner, nowhere else but Chicago made sense.
Thirty-three years later, after Lightfoot won the April 2 runoff election, the headlines declared that Chicago was about to get its first black female mayor — and its first mayor who’s openly gay. But none of those identities may tell us as much about how she plans to run the city as this fact: Lightfoot is the first elected Chicago mayor in over a century who was neither born nor raised here. The Chicago Way, which holds that politics is based on family, friendships, and favors, was not part of her upbringing, and indeed she was elected mayor because she promised to root out the vestiges of the entrenched Chicago machine.
It was frigid at a campaign event two days be fore the primary, but Light foot’s teams till quickly ran out of literature. “When you see that kind of feeling of a surge, we thought, ‘Yeah. Something could happen.’”
That may be a task best suited to an outsider. As Chicago has evolved from the provincial industrial city in which the machine took shape into a cosmopolitan cultural capital, transplants such as Lightfoot and some of her fellow Big Ten graduates have attained more and more influence over the city’s culture. They have long dominated
