anything. She described to me how her transition from corporate law into
government felt like a relief, an energizing leap out of the super-groomed
unreality of high-class law being practiced on the top floors of skyscrapers and
into the real world—the very real world.
Chicago’s City Hall and County Building is a flat-roofed, eleven-story,
gray-granite monolith that occupies an entire block between Clark and LaSalle
north of the Loop. Compared with the soaring office towers surrounding it, it’s
squatty but not without grandeur, featuring tall Corinthian columns out front and
giant, echoing lobbies made primarily of marble. The county runs its business out
of the east-facing half of the building; the city uses the western half, which houses
the mayor and city council members as well as the city clerk. City hall, as I
learned on the sweltering summer day I showed up to meet Valerie for a job
interview, was both alarmingly and upliftingly packed with people.
There were couples getting married and people registering cars. There were
people lodging complaints about potholes, their landlords, their sewer lines, and
everything else they felt the city could improve. There were babies in strollers
and old ladies in wheelchairs. There were journalists and lobbyists, and also
homeless people just looking to get out of the heat. Out on the sidewalk in front
of the building, a knot of activists waved signs and shouted chants, though I can’t
remember what it was they were angry about. What I do know is that I was
simultaneously taken aback and completely enthralled by the clunky, controlled
chaos of the place. City hall belonged to the people. It had a noisy, gritty
immediacy that I never felt at Sidley.
Valerie had reserved twenty minutes on her schedule to talk to me that day,
but our conversation ended up stretching for an hour and a half. A thin, light-
skinned African American woman dressed in a beautifully tailored suit, she was
soft-spoken and strikingly serene, with a steady brown-eyed gaze and an
impressive grasp of how the city functioned. She enjoyed her job but didn’t try to
gloss over the bureaucratic headaches of government work. Something about her
caused me instantly to relax. Years later, Valerie would tell me that to her surprise
I’d managed to reverse the standard interview process on her that day—that I’d
given her some basic, helpful information about myself, but otherwise I’d grilled
her, wanting to understand every last feeling she had about the work she did and
how responsive the mayor was to his employees. I was testing the suitability of
the work for me as much as she was testing the suitability of me for the work.
Looking back on it, I’m sure I was only capitalizing on what felt like a rare