It’s tricky to write a story about Rahm Emanuel without Rahm Emanuel. His spokesperson, Matthew McGrath, expressed that he would be interested in being interviewed about his attempts to build up the Windy City in the Great Recession’s aftermath. Though the man has, per a recent New York Times profile, spent the past few months wining and dining his Democratic Rolodex to prepare for the midterm elections, I held out hope for a few minutes of his time to probe how his thoughts on city building evolved over his two-term tenure.
Alas, no such luck getting him on the horn. The man, who turns sixty-seven in November, seems to have much bigger issues in mind: notably his potential run for the US presidency in 2028 (the likelihood of which, as he told the Times, is somewhere between 1 and 49 percent). So I can’t blame him for ghosting. Yet he still looms large in his hometown—arguably some of the city’s most consequential projects happened under his watch, while communities still grapple with the fallout from his contentious education policies. His architectural legacy is…
