Chicago is amythic city. Its representation in the popular imagination is varied and has included, at various times, the attributes of a blue-collar town, a city in a garden, and a gangster's paradise. Myths of Chicago “grow abundantly between fact and emotion,” and they selectively and simultaneously evoke and defer attributes of the city. For one perduring myth, social scientists may be held largely responsible: namely, that Chicago is “one of the most planned cities of themodern era,” with a street grid, layout of buildings and waterways, and organization of its residential and commercial architecture that reveal a “geometric certainty” (Suttles 1990). The lasting scholarly fascination with Chicago's geography derives in part from the central role that social scientists played in constructing the planned city. In the 1920s,University of Chicago sociologist Ernest Burgess worked with his colleagues in other social science …