The Bears Belong to Chicago
Sandburg, Royko, Telander, Kamin, Terkel, Bey, Steinberg, Ditka. A hundred years of Chicago writers have already made this argument better than we can. We gathered it in one place.
By Dear Kevin Warren · 2026-02-26
Carl Sandburg ended his poem about this city with a dare, in 1914, and nobody has answered it since. Go ahead. Try.
This is the city that burned to the ground and rebuilt itself taller. That reversed the direction of a river because the river was in the way. That put up the first skyscraper and then kept 26 miles of its own shoreline public so anybody could walk it for free. Studs Terkel spent sixty years listening to the place and called it "America's dream, writ large. And flamboyantly."
And on Sunday afternoons in the fall, that city plays football outdoors, on the water, in whatever weather shows up.
That is the thing somebody is trying to load into a moving truck.
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Carl Sandburg, "Chicago" (1914)
What this is actually about
We have spent two years doing arithmetic in public. Assessment freezes. PILOT floors with no floor in them. Bond schedules, infrastructure line items, the Soldier Field renovation debt from 2003 that Illinois taxpayers are still carrying. That work is real and we are not stopping.
But the arithmetic is not why anybody reads this site, and it is not why we started it.
We started it because a football team that has belonged to this city for 106 years is being shopped around, and the people doing the shopping keep talking as though the only thing left behind would be a parking lot on the lake.
It is not a parking lot. Let some better writers explain.
One family, one city, a hundred and six years
George Halas moved the Decatur Staleys here in 1921 and named them after the Cubs, because that's who was renting him the ballpark. They played at Wrigley for half a century. They came down to the lakefront in 1971 and never left. Virginia McCaskey watched almost all of it.
Two NFL franchises are still run by the people who founded them. Green Bay is owned by the town itself. Ours is a Chicago family that has been here since Prohibition.
Mike Ditka, who is not a sentimental man, put it to the Daily Herald in one sentence in 2021.
He is right that it should be the end of it. It isn't, so here's the rest.
The Chicago Bears belong in the city of Chicago. That's it. They're a Chicago institution, and that should be the end of it.
Mike Ditka, Daily Herald, 2021
The lakefront was never theirs to sell
Long before there was a stadium question there was a lakefront question, and Chicago settled it more than a century ago. Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett wrote it into the 1909 Plan of Chicago in language that leaves no wiggle room: the lake front by right belongs to the people, and not a foot of its shore should be appropriated to the exclusion of the people.
That sentence is why roughly 18 miles of this shoreline is public parkland instead of private frontage, in a city that would happily have sold every inch of it. Chicago has been in and out of court over that principle for more than a century, and it has mostly won.
Rick Telander covered this fight at the Sun-Times for thirty years. In May 2024, when the Bears rolled out their domed lakefront rendering, he wrote the plainest version of it anyone has managed.
Telander went further than defending the shoreline. He wanted the city to think bigger than a stadium at all: tear out Lake Shore Drive, he argued, and make Chicago a city on the lake instead of a city by the lake. Make no little plans, the man said. Or, he wrote, we can just build another stadium by the lake and watch the games that happen there. That is easy. That is small.
Lee Bey, the Sun-Times architecture critic who once sat inside City Hall while the last Soldier Field deal was being cut, addressed the mayor directly in April 2024: Chicago's crown jewel is its lakefront, and you're helping to tarnish it. Bey's objection was not to the building. It was to the address. It's the right building but the wrong spot, he wrote. Frankly, it would've fit well in Arlington Heights. Then the question nobody at the podium wanted: how can a mayor allow a billion-dollar football franchise to build what it likes on the lakefront, then charge taxpayers for the privilege?
The Sun-Times editorial board asked the only question that has ever mattered here, in March 2024: who in government is truly minding the store when it comes to mapping the future of this critical area of the lakefront? Two years later, nobody has answered it.
The Lake front by right belongs to the people. Not the Bears. Not the mayor. The people.
Rick Telander, Chicago Sun-Times, May 2024
Let it age with the city
Blair Kamin won a Pulitzer at the Tribune in 1999 for a series defending this shoreline. Four years later he watched the renovation set a modern bowl down inside Soldier Field's 1924 colonnades and named it the Eyesore on the Lake Shore. Telander calls the same building a Flying Toilet Seat. They have earned the right. It is a strange-looking building.
We love it anyway, and we're not going to be embarrassed about that.
Chicago keeps its old things and lives in them. Wrigley Field opened in 1914 and still fills up. The Water Tower stood through the fire and never came down. The L runs on iron laid before anybody reading this was born, and nobody apologizes for the noise. This is not a town that trades in its house every twenty years because somebody down the block got a new one.
The colonnades went up in 1924 as a war memorial, and a century later they are still out there on the lake, next to the Field Museum, with the whole skyline standing behind the north end zone. You cannot build that. You cannot buy it. It only happens by sitting in the same place, in the weather, for a hundred years, until the place is yours.
And nobody has ever sold the name. Two buildings in this league still carry a name that wasn't bought: Lambeau Field and Soldier Field. One is named after the man who founded the team the town owns. Ours is named after the dead. Everybody else plays in a building named for an airline, an insurance company, or a bank, and every one of those names has an expiration date on it.
Here's what's on offer instead. A dome in a parking lot. Look at Indianapolis, Detroit, Atlanta, Las Vegas, Arlington: same box, same roof, same sealed concourse, same naming-rights deal with the same bank, up for renegotiation in twenty years when the box stops looking new. That isn't ambition. That's keeping up with the neighbors, at a cost of billions, using public money, for a building nobody will be able to tell apart from the last one.
Buildings that stay become landmarks. Buildings that chase become obsolete on a schedule somebody else sets.
So let Soldier Field get old. Let the concrete stain. Let the seats wear down and the wind keep coming off the lake every December and the arguments about the architecture go on for another hundred years. That's not neglect. That's what a home is.
Buildings that stay become landmarks. Buildings that chase become obsolete on a schedule somebody else sets.
Dear Kevin Warren
Outside is not a hardship, it is the sport
Ditka again, same interview, and this is the part people skip: Chicago Bears football weather is a great part of the legacy, and all of that legacy in his lifetime has been outdoors.
The weather is half the home-field advantage. It's what a Dolphins tackle thinks about on the flight in. It's why a Bears December means something a Bears October doesn't. Green Bay, Buffalo and New England built their reputations in it, and Buffalo just opened a brand-new stadium with no roof on it, on purpose, in one of the snowiest cities in America.
The honest counterpoint comes from Paul Sullivan of the Tribune, who has covered this town too long to be sentimental about frostbite. He suspects a lot of us are frauds, secretly hoping for a dome while pretending to prefer the status quo. His verdict on the romance of cold-weather football is that we still like feeling our toes. Fair. Some Sundays we agree with him around the third quarter.
But a roof is not a coat. A roof is a permanent decision, made once, that turns Sunday into an indoor event with the weather edited out. Everything people still talk about thirty years later happened because the sky was there: Urlacher and the trophy in the snow, the fog game, the breath of 60,000 people hanging over the bowl at once. You cannot build that back in later.
All of that legacy in Chicago in my life has been outdoors.
Mike Ditka
They want the name without the city
Chicago has had this fight before, and the mayor who had it was not subtle. In April 1975, when the Bears were flirting with Arlington Heights the first time, Richard J. Daley announced the terms: they will never use the name of Chicago as long as I am mayor.
Mike Royko wrote it up in the Daily News the way only Royko could, noting that Daley had reached the point of thinking he held a copyright on the word Chicago. Royko was needling him, and Royko was also making Daley's point for him. The name is worth something. Everybody in that argument knew it, including the team.
Fifty years later, Neil Steinberg watched the Bears announce for the suburbs while keeping the wordmark, and nailed the posture exactly: too good to actually play in the city, but gripping the city's name hard, stiff-arming anyone who would take it away. Steinberg lives in Northbrook and says so, which earns him the line only a suburbanite gets to write. The suburban stain doesn't wash off. Believe me, I tried.
Then June 2026 happened. The legislature went home at 4:30 in the morning with nothing passed, and four days later the board voted to advance a domed stadium on a capped slag heap in Hammond, Indiana. Scoop Jackson wrote the sentence that went around the city that weekend.
Jackson's real warning was not about geography. It was about what a franchise spends when it decides a fan base will follow it anywhere. Where the Bears called home and where their home actually is, he wrote, will always be two different things to us once they decided to leave. Ask St. Louis. Ask Oakland. Ask San Diego, which lost a football team and got a lesson in how transferable loyalty actually is.
After 106 years, the Bears are giving the city and state the peace sign. Along with the middle finger.
Scoop Jackson, Chicago Sun-Times, June 2026
Everybody's team, everybody's shoreline
Here's the part that gets left out of the stadium coverage entirely.
Steve Greenberg wrote in the Sun-Times that the Bears are as much a part of the lakefront as frozen breath, and that Chicago is filled with sports fans who understand some relationships were meant to be inextricable. Then he landed it: Chicago without the Bears, like a giant bean without a reflection.
That relationship was never limited to people who can afford a ticket. Six miles south of Soldier Field, at the 59th Street Harbor, Bears fans fill a clubhouse and a parking lot every fall, projectors in the lot, everybody in their gear. Gena Jones wrote about that harbor and about her father, who as a young man took part in the wade-ins at Rainbow Beach, back when a chain-link fence ran into the water to keep Black Chicagoans on the worse side of it. Her family won that shoreline. They did not win it so somebody could put a private box on it.
The line from her piece we cannot stop thinking about came from a man at the harbor, talking about this city: I love this place so much, I wouldn't leave here to go to Heaven.
That is what the lakefront is for. Free at the water's edge, the same for everyone, the one thing in Chicago a hedge fund never got its hands on.
Studs Terkel spent sixty years listening to this city and decided the whole story came down to a single running argument: it is still the arena of those who dream of the City of Man and those who envision a City of Things. A stadium subsidy is a City of Things proposition. Sunday on the lakefront, in the wind, with the whole city in it, is the other one.
I love this place so much, I wouldn't leave here to go to Heaven.
Overheard at the 59th Street Harbor
So what are we doing here
We read the bills, and we'll keep reading them, because that's how you win an argument like this. The freeze terms, the PILOT floor that isn't there, Indiana's SB 27, the Hammond environmental clock, the money still owed on the last stadium promise. Everything we publish is sourced and linked, and when we get something wrong we say so in public. That's the standard we hold Kevin Warren to, so it applies here first.
But the numbers are the evidence. They are not the case.
The case is that the Bears are a Chicago institution the way the Water Tower is a Chicago institution, and no development agreement has ever manufactured that. The case is that the lakefront belongs to the people, in writing, since 1909, and stayed that way because Chicagoans kept showing up to defend it. The case is that football in this city is supposed to be played outdoors, in the cold, next to the water, in front of a crowd that had to earn its afternoon.
Sandburg called us the City of the Big Shoulders. Nobody puts a roof over shoulders like that.
Bear Down.
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