 This is Chicago, marketplace of the Midwest, hub of big business, and a mecca of culture. Typical city in a nation which will be 75% urbanized within this decade. Even their skyline is one of the most beautiful in the world. Etched against the impressive clearness of Lake Michigan. Perhaps this is the scene that most catches the visitor's eye when he comes to the city for the first time. A picture of wealth and serenity. These lies in the city. America's cities have their roots in the commercial enterprise. They are geographical expressions of economic reality. Our cities developed around factory smokestacks, harbors, or great cotton and slave markets. The notion that the modern city rooted in commerce should be beautiful was an afterthought. And when cities were beautified, their giant parks and mansions and skyscrapers became testimonies to the economic pride of a nation of builders. Bustling men who steadfastly challenged the natural and human elements in their path and emerged in the eyes of themselves and the country as conquerors. America has rarely loved her cities. To be sure, there are always those who seek the culture, entertainment, and glamour of the metropolis. But the dominant American attitude towards cities is one of mistrust. Americans see the country as the bastion of decency, beauty, virtue, and peace. The city is a place for sharp operators, brothels, and other pitfalls. Or so the story goes. If we have little love for the city, we cannot deny the fact that our future as a people lies in the city. It's a big place, but it's also a lonely place. I don't think anybody cares what happens to you. I mean, you could drop dead in the street, nobody'd help you or pick you up or at least cover you. I mean, it's a cold city. The thing I feel bad about city life is, well, you're so busy, you have very little time to think and do things as you like. You're so involved and picked up in the hustle and bustle of life. I always claim that I love the city, but when it comes right down to it, I love it for reasons which do not relate to most of the people who live in the city. They seem to be much more wrapped up in their own particular worlds and trying to better themselves and not worry so much about the individuals. I think part of the coldness and rudeness and pushing is just simply there are too many people to keep caring all the time that you bump one or that you knock one. I've been around and highly do what you want. The people who have lived in an urban center and in a slum situation for many years certainly do have rights. These rights ought to be respected. Frustrate of the imaginative and creative efforts of very diligent people are trying to bring back vitality and wholeness and beauty into the city. The real issue is not individual persons but the hope of the whole city. We have to have high-rise apartments in order to provide those dwelling spaces. We have to have a three-dimensional city. I would rather live in a cold water flat. Four flights up. And I don't like to walk four flights with loads of groceries and laundries. If I had to choose, then I would live there rather than in one of these nice projects. I don't know. I don't like people stacked up on top of each other. I don't like apartments in the first place. For more than one-third of the city's residents, this choice between gleaming high-rise and four-story walk-up does not exist. For generations, the poor and disinherited of our nation have moved to the great cities. Their hopes set upon release from poverty through a good job, a better education. But the promise of the city is not always fulfilled. Often one becomes a statistic in an unemployment office. Catch-alls for the persons who are left on the education and training necessary for success in an industrial society which has increasingly little use for the unskilled worker. The specter of future joblessness helps to swell the high school drop-out roles which reach more than 50% of school-age youth in some sections of the city. The inner city has its discouraging aspect. We have great big sewer rats. I mean, they're much larger than the ordinary house rats. They come through the ceilings and through the bathroom wall. That completely came then. We had leaks and the ceilings and the walls, which the walls are still very bad and the ceilings are still cracked. The certainty of life circumscribed by barriers of race and class is visible. For some, the question of the separation of race and class within the metropolis is rarely raised. Others deny that barriers exist. The mayor of Chicago. We have no ghettos in Chicago at all. Total dilapidated buildings in Chicago are lower than any large metropolitan area in the United States. So we have no ghettos and we have no negro ghettos. Those who would bridge the city's barriers are alarmed by the most extreme expression of resentment yet to emerge from the inner city. The black Muslim movement. Public and private agencies attempt to deal with city problems. The traditional pattern has been one of charity. The handout. The pattern of treating the less privileged in our city as we would a sick child in need of a few weeks in the country. The real question is not whether the city will listen to the prescriptions of the well-intentioned, but whether they have really listened to the city. And would they understand what they heard, even if they learned to listen? The city knows its moments of rest, take excitement of night, the moments of the day, the ugliness of tenement life, the impersonality of the high-rise apartment building, the specter of joblessness, the loss of dignity, the anonymity. These do not tell the city's full story, for the city is as deeply human in its misery and grandeur as is any other form of society. Indeed, for most in our nation, and no less for our children, the city is the only society that we will know. Beauty in our emerging city is less in buildings than in persons. Privacy is scarce. Moments of meeting are many, and yet this too is but a fragment of the city. A pleasant sign of hope perhaps, but still a fragment. One cannot grasp the city's beauty and warmth without also grasping the ugliness and sorrow. And the last barrier is personal. To break bread across a table with someone different from yourself. To advocate a neighbor's rights when you might have turned away. To give yourself not to the safe pursuits, but to the living realities of the great city. Escape is possible, but escape to what? Some tiny fragment of a tiny world that may be safe for you? The emerging metropolis is here. Its problems will multiply. Whose problems? Are they only those of the poor? Is not one man's problem on others? Or is the city to become a labyrinth of barriers constricting human contact? A city of the up-and-outs and the down-and-outs? A city of choice and a city of necessity? Man, that's just big talk. Big talk. You're gonna feel good because you see pretty pictures of black and white kids playing together? You know they've been doing that for over 300 years here in the mountain. That ain't nothing new. Sure, kids will play together till they learn better. Then they start imitating you, like when they're seven or eight. Don't look to your kids to do the job. Whatever's gonna happen here is gonna happen because of you. This one, man, it's all yours.