When I was young and looking for a chance to get away from the stultifying suburb where I grew up, there were a lot of places I considered moving. New York was in the mix, as was Los Angeles — all the usual suspects when you’re dreaming of making it in a big city. (Phoenix, where I was born, still wasn’t in that league back then, though economic and demographic shifts — not to mention spiraling rents spiraling elsewhere — have made it the fifth-largest city in the country, something that seemed unthinkable at the time.)

But the people I trusted most — my friends who had moved to Arizona from elsewhere, my acquaintances who had traveled more widely than I had, my teammates from high school baseball — all told me that Chicago was the place to be. Many of them were from the South Side, and all of them had stories about what an amazing place it was to live, to work, to enjoy life. One ex-bandmate, who grew up in the South Side neighborhood of Bridgeport, put it in a language that he correctly guessed I would understand: “Chicago is like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off if you’re rich,” he said, “and it’s like The Blues Brothers if you’re poor.”