The few times I’ve been to downtown Chicago, I’ve found it to be bleak and depressing. Careful what you wish for!
I found San Francisco to be much prettier and more uplifting to walk around.[/quote]
Chicago is definitely becoming a “hip” mecca for high tech.
When Google bought Motorola one of the first things they did was lease the top several floors of the Merchant Mart building in downtown Chicago. They wanted to google-ize stodgey suburban Motorola. At the time my cynical self said it was a way to do a backdoor layoff without severance… move 42 miles from Libertyville to the loop, which is less than 50 miles, so no relo packages required. Plus the older suburbanites wouldn’t want to leave their suburbs and deal with the urban work environment. But they successfully kept a huge percentage of the workforce from Libertyville (those they hadn’t downsized in RIFs).
But then again, right after they opened the Merchant Mart corporate headquarters Mot-Goog was sold to Lenovo.
Even still – downtown Chicago is hipper than it used to be.
