Introduction
“The city is an organic thing, changing every day, every hour, and trying to capture it at any given moment would seem a crazy notion."
– Rick Kogan
Over 25 years ago, Gary Comer was driving in the Loop when the thought suddenly struck him that by the year 3000, the view he was seeing would be drastically different. Inspired by the dawn of a new millennium, Comer, a proud Chicagoan and founder of Land's End, funded an unprecedented project to record the city he loved, creating Chicago In The Year 2000, or CITY 2000.
For Comer, the upcoming millennium was a time of reflection: In a thousand years, what will remain of what we see today? What do we want people in the future to learn from us? Comer wanted the answers to these questions to come from all the neighborhoods and communities in Chicago.
CITY 2000 began officially at midnight on January 1st, 2000, and ended at midnight on December 31st, 2000. Within that year, over 200 photographers, videographers, and journalists completed 2,805 subprojects – containing over 500,000 images. The collection was donated to the UIC Library in 2001 and housed in the Special Collections and University Archives department. 72% of the collection comprises still image film projects, while the remainder is in video and audio formats used at the time.
All 50 wards and 77 community areas of Chicago are represented. The material shows the range of the socio-economic, racial, and ethnic characteristics of the city’s population and neighborhoods, from Rogers Park to Pullman to Humboldt Park. As Chicago historian Studs Terkel wrote, the photographers focused on people and places “that many of us may see but never really catch beneath their surface.” The result is that the CITY2000 collection reflects the multifaceted place that Chicago was and remains. It pauses the city we walk through, encouraging us to see the depths of Chicagoans that go unnoticed and unadmired.
In celebration of CITY 2000’s 25th anniversary, the University of Illinois Chicago Library’s Special Collections and University Archives Department created this digital exhibit. As the city continues to grow and change, the CITY 2000 project will remain a cultural record of, as Comer later wrote,
“what we were; of how we worked, how we lived and how we played.”
CITY 2000 photographers recorded historic, exciting, and mundane moments that revealed the heart of Chicagoans experiencing the fresh beginning of a new millennium. These images highlight the lives of Chicagoans and preserve their enduring joy and pride for their city.
Click on a section below to explore Chicago In The Year 2000.