the excitement of "coming of age"

What's the most exciting city in the US to live in? A subjectiv question, but to me it could very well be one that is "coming of age" at the time you live in it, that special time when it splashes on the global scene as a complete a through package, operating on all cyllindes, and offering its own unique impression of what a city should be. The earliest city in the US to truly come of age, of course, was New York. Paralleling the growth of the US, New York truly sprung onto the world stage in the early part of the 20th century, the American century, as business, commerce, entertainment, the arts, technology, etc., mixed with American optimisim and its new role on the global stage to create what is perhaps the greatest of all coming of age. If there ever was a city I wish I could have visited, it would be the New York of the first have of the 20th century....with Gershwin's Rapsody in Blue playing on my 21st century iPod. LA burst on the scene after WWII with the glamour of Hollywood mixing with that city's incredible industrial might (heightened by war) at a time when the American Dream was turning into California Dreaming. LA continues to come of age as it urbanizes that post WWII city in exciting and dramatic ways. On a smaller scale, Washington shed its sleepy southern past and became a major player with the growth of the US government and need for lobbyists and professional associations to gravitate to it. Buf if I were to look to 2006 and the era of years on either side of it, no American city, IMHO, is coming of age today like CHICAGO is. Chicago has had many years and eras of greatness...the industrialization era, the role of middle man in the US with its assent to the nation's transportation center, the architcture and city planning that followed the great fire, the birth of the skyscrapper, worlds fairs of note, the union between business and culture, mail order houses, the concept of a free and open waterfront, a city of neighboroods of every ethnicity, a hotbed of labor activism, the ultimate city machine, the world's tallest building, busiest airport, largest convention center, and all thos eother #1's we used to love. But today, more than any other time, we're putting it all together. The growth and deveopment of our spectacular core, the influence this growth has had on the peripheral areas north, west, and south of it, the energy the city is creating, the magnet it has become for midwesterners and those beyond, the extraordinary cross section of ethnicities today, the sense that a city can be planned (stronger here than anywhere)....it all combines to create a city reaching some kind of zenieth, some kind of special place in this world of ours. It is impossible to travel the streets of Chicago and not feel the change on a daily basis, the transformation that is taking place. That's what I'm seeing.....the coming of age of a great American city, unparrelled at this juncture in history anywhere in our nation. Do others agree or do you think I missed the mark on this one and see it vastly differently?>