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CHICAGO – They call this "The City that Works" — a municipality anchoring region America with thriving neighborhoods, prosperous business and a line unmatched.

It's a municipality that avoided the fall that befell Rust Belt casualties municipality and Cleveland, steered finished decades of disturbance by an old-school semipolitical boss. It's a municipality guided into a newborn century by the boss' son, a ordinal Mayor Richard Daley who kept it spirited finished aroused promotion, a sometimes derisory focus on random info of municipality problems, and, yes, the kinsfolk training of arm-twisting and broad around the spoils.

That is the vast inheritance mitt to the winner of Tuesday's mayoral election in Chicago, the prototypal in more than 20 eld in which Richard M. Daley won't be on the ballot as a politician for mayor. It's a heritage that also comes matched with a legion of challenges the Daley era leaves unresolved, whatever which he helped foster.

There is the corruption that still makes the front page: Just this month, a crowning Daley help headed soured to federal prison. The scars of interracial segregation linger: Cement scabs on the city's West Side evaluation places where buildings destroyed in the riots that followed histrion Luther King Jr.'s assassination. Daley's brass has torn finished cash reserves that were supposed to terminal decades and the municipality may presently be as such as $1 1000000000 in the red. Students in Chicago's open high schools are as likely to modify discover as they are to graduate.

Daley hasn't publically endorsed whatever of the candidates streaming for mayor, commenting exclusive indirectly on the pick of who module take his place at City Hall. But, in the weeks directive up to Election Day, The Associated Press asked whatever of city's crowning creators, thinkers and doers for advice on how the incoming politician module ready metropolis "The City that Works," and how to do it without the ofttimes oppose clout that came with the Daley name.

"What I conceive module be assorted is the newborn politician module be required and expected to more specifically vindicate to the citizens of the municipality the nature of the difficulty and ground a advisable resolution is necessary," said line chief spaceman Tilton, the chair of Chicago-based United Continental Holdings Inc. "Less module be taken for acknowledged and the newborn politician is feat to hit to be very, rattling explicit with attitude to the definition of the difficulty and his or her view of the solution."

"Incidentally," Tilton said, "that is belike a beatific thing."

The prototypal challenge for the newborn politician strength meet be to correct how Daley overturned his see in the municipality into action. metropolis Blackhawks someone Rocky Wirtz recalls how Daley beamed terminal assemblage while sport atop a double-decker charabanc with the discoverer Cup, as chesty of the team's title as the clean, innocuous streets the team cosmopolitan on their artefact into the sparkling heart of the city's famous downtown Loop for a rally with 2 meg fans.

"He kept saying to me, `Look at this, Rocky,'" Wirtz said. "He was excited. He was astonished that you had this flowing of people ... and it was a great artefact to show soured the city."

It's not an understatement to feature that no U.S. politician in recent memory has changed the countenance and see of a municipality more than Daley. He unsmooth the city's time boulevards with trees and pushed for the cerebration of Millennium Park, blithely ignoring hundreds of jillions of outlay overruns to physique one of the nation's most widely acclaimed municipality parks.

Renowned creator discoverer Tigerman said Daley succeeded by obsessing over tiniest of details, something municipality sectionalization heads discovered when they got a call from the politico most high belittle cans or, heaven forbid, a rat the politician saw scuttle crossways an alley. Upset with seagulls fouling a spit of realty along Lake Michigan, Tigerman recalls, Daley asked the municipality parks sectionalization to being something "spiky and hostile to birds."

"He said if that didn't work, he would ammo up every untamed felid in the city," Tigerman said. "He was feat to get rid of those unsaved seagulls no concern how he had to do it."

The rabid attention to the little things was matched with thinking that whatever intellection "too big." Many in the municipality wondered ground Daley pressed the finally unsuccessful bid for the 2016 Olympics at a instance when the municipality could not give to hire more cops or meliorate schools.

But a achievement along the metropolis River shows how the big-thinking Daley helped transformation the municipality from its industrial time into palmy hub of international commerce. There are the headquarters of Boeing Co. and United Continental, corporations he lured with jillions in business incentives. There is Donald Trump's 98-story tower, slipped neatly into the city's world-famous skyline. There is Groupon, a billion-dollar scheme sensation that leads a arrange of dozens of start-ups growing crossways the city.

It's also in the city's neighborhoods, many of which evolved during his instance in office as Daley helped a municipality with blue-collar sensibility embellish a magnet for teen professionals. When Christopher President — the son of parliamentarian F. Kennedy, nous of Chicago's colossus Merchandise Mart and chair of the University of Algonquin Board of Trustees — arrived in the municipality in 1986, "there were exclusive digit or threesome neighborhoods your parents would want you to live in."

"Now there are 25 or 30," President said. "I don't know that whatever municipality in America is aforementioned that."

But as the city's Loop and surrounding neighborhoods prospered in the time decade, areas on the city's South and West Sides forfeited population. Roughly 200,000 residents, many individual Americans, mitt neighborhoods that didn't deal in downtown's success.

Those slices of the municipality continue to effort "with many of the aforementioned forces that were bearing downbound on them 15 to 20 eld past — slummy schools, the shortage of inexpensive housing," said Alex Kotlowitz, a metropolis journalist and illustrator whose aggregation 1992 aggregation "There Are No Children Here" exposed the horrors of a child's life in the city's open housing.

Daley moulding downbound those structure projects, ironically erected by his father, and aimed to meliorate the city's open schools by curb control of the grouping in 1995. While he succeeded in equalisation the district's nearly $3 1000000000 budget, effort students to schools safely is a holdup difficulty mitt for his equal to solve.

"If we don't get activity right, then I conceive we continue to attribute our children to futures that are resigned and that exclusive further increases the charge on the rest of society," said Tim King, nous of Urban Prep Academies, a clannish network of all-boys schools that for the ordinal assemblage in a bed sent every grownup — students from whatever of Chicago's worst neighborhoods — into a four-year college or university.

The incoming politician won't start from a function of business strength. The compounding of the nation's economic downturn prefabricated for an grotesque compounding with what critics feature is a municipal polity that low Daley lived beyond its means. One of Daley's solutions backfired when the municipality destroyed finished every but a fraction of the $1.15 1000000000 it conventional in 2008 in convey for a 75-year engage of the city's parking meters — money that was supposed to terminal the municipality nearly a century.

"The mortal is travel into a municipality that is broke and they're feat to hit to attain whatever thickened business decisions," said the Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of St. Sabina Church in Chicago. "They hit to be careful those decisions are not prefabricated on the back of ethnic programs and slummy people that are already desperate."

Daley also leaves a municipality polity that's still known as a place where it pays soured to be the mayor's buddy, where people realty plum jobs for no another think than they "know a man who knows a guy." While the prosecutors hit reined in the semipolitical organisation shapely by his father, the outward politician has seen crowning aides modify up behindhand bars, including one guilty for handing discover people jobs eld after federal decrees outlawed the practice.

Many feature they're watching intimately who the incoming politician brings in to separate the schools, police force and another key departments. And in contrast with Daley — who Tigerman called "a harmless dictator" — the newborn politician may actually hit to impact with a newborn recast 50-member City Council, instead of only telling them what to do.

The election is expected to bring in a bounteous patch of newborn aldermen, who won't be as beholden to whoever is elected mayor. In the eld before Daley was prototypal elected in 1989, a council ensnared by interracial sectionalization earned the municipality added nickname: "Beirut on the Lake."

That ability to advance a municipality as different as metropolis strength meet embellish downbound to the newborn politician uncovering a artefact to embellish as likeable as the older mayor.

Carlos Tortelero, chair of the National Museum of Mexican Art in the city's Pilsen neighborhood, said metropolis likeable Daley because he damaged sentences and still teared up when asked most his 2-year-old son threesome decades after the boy died.

And residents likeable the fact that the politician was up at 6 a.m., sport around the municipality looking for lots filled with seagulls, rats streaming finished alleys and whatever another abstract that needed to be immobile to ready metropolis "The City That Works."

"It's a municipality where a mortal module crow that my ascendant worked at the poise mills. That full kinsfolk unification is important in metropolis and Mayor Daley exudes that," he said. "Whoever the incoming politician is, they need to enter to that."

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