In the tradition of E.B. White’s bestselling Here Is New York, here is a tribute to the “Second City”—part history, part memoir, and 100 percent Studs Terkel—infused with anecdotes, memories, and reflections that celebrate the great city of Chicago.

Chicago was home to the country’s first skyscraper (a ten-story building built in 1884) and marks the start of the famed “Route 66.” It was also the birthplace of the remote control (Zenith) and the car radio (Motorola), and the first major American city to elect a woman (Jane Byrne) and then an African American man (Harold Washington) as mayor. Its literary and journalistic history is just as dazzling, featuring Nelson Algren, Mike Royko, and Sara Paretsky. From Al Capone to the street riots during the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Chicago, in the words of Studs himself, “has—as they used to whisper of the town’s fast woman—a reputation.”

Chicago was of course also home to the Pulitzer Prize–winning oral historian Studs Terkel, who moved there in 1922 at age ten and made it his home until his death in 2008 at the age of ninety-six. Illustrated throughout with black-and-white photographs that perfectly capture Chicago’s unique beauty, here is a splendid evocation of Studs’s hometown in all of its glory and imperfection.