[LouisVanDerWright]

^^^ Without a doubt the origin's of Chicago's design preferences lie in the history of the city as the crucible of the modern industrialized era. Chicago was built entirely of the modern era and I don't say that as a reference to style, but as a reference to how people live their lives. Chicago was the great funnel that siphoned the vast resources of the American West and processed them into the consumer goods that now define modern life. It was the first place that ever happened and it demanded changes in thinking across the board from architecture to design to economics to sociology to politics to planning.

The most amazing aspect of that history is how strong it still rings true today. Chicago is still an incredibly young city and is still experimenting much more than truly stabilized, developed, cities like NYC or London. You have to remember that Chicago was not built one building at a time, it was built blocks at a time as the manufacturing techniques developed in her factories were applied to breaking the prairie for urban use. We have entire neighborhoods that were constructed in a decade. Rome wasn't built in a day, but Chicago more or less was. That means all the buildings in those areas have synced depreciation cycles and all got derelict simultaneously. That history of industrial design is woven into the basic fabric of our neighborhoods. That's a large part of why we have massive ghettos and extreme segregation, everything happened so fast here that there was no time to balance. So now we are in a new era of experimentation as the city center begins to revitalize. We have a new frontier of rebuilding the world's first industrial city and the world's first post-industrial city. The lessons we learn now will likely be applied in Chinese cities in 30 or 40 years or perhaps in Eastern European industrial cities in the next decade.

That legacy still informs the culture of Chicago and is really what causes the separation you have observed between NYC and Chicago.