Sidewalks: Portraits of Chicago (Chicago Lives) - Softcover

A fascinating tour of Chicago through the words and images of one of the city's beloved newspaper columns

Few people know Chicago as do Rick Kogan and Charles Osgood, and their "Sidewalks" column for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine is a tour of the city like no other, taking readers to the off-beat and quintessential spots that give Chicago its character--that make its inhabitants feel at home and tell its visitors that they have arrived. Accompanied by evocative color photographs by Charles Osgood, Kogan's pieces revisit the lost places and people of Chicago, and take readers down the quiet byways and thriving thoroughfares, pointing out the characters and cornerstones, the oddities and institutions that make the city what it is. In this collection you will find an elegy for Maxwell Street, the marketplace that pulsed with city life for more than 100 years; a remembrance of a disturbing advertisement ("Are you a slave to housework?") on the side of a building on Irving Park Road; a cross marking a deadly intersection; a magical miniature golf course; as well as ballad singer Fred Holstein, the denizens of the World Gym and memories of Bensinger's pool hall, the day-camp kids of summer, bike couriers, the creatures of the beach, and much, much more. Here is Chicago, past, present, and--let's hope--future, captured in the unique archive of Sidewalks.

Born and raised in Chicago, Rick Kogan began his newspaper career at sixteen. He has worked for theChicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, and Chicago Tribune, where he is a senior writer and columnist for the Sunday magazine. He is the author of ten books, includingYesterday’s Chicago (in collaboration with his father, Herman); Everybody Pays: Two Men, One Murder, and the Price of Truth (in collaboration with Maurice Possley);America’s Mom: The Life, Lessons, and Legacy of Ann Landers; and A Chicago Tavern: A Goat, a Curse, and the American Dream, the history of the Billy Goat. He is also the creator and host of WGN’sSunday Papers with Rick Kogan.

Charles Osgood was born in Milwaukee and raised in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. He attended Ripon College and received a master of fine arts in photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After beginning his career at the City News Bureau, he came to the Chicago Tribune as a reporter, switching to photography, his lifelong passion, in 1970. Since then assignments have taken him along sidewalks around the world.