Chicago, the victim of "the great upscalization"?

Playing off of Joel Hoglund’s piece yesterday about colorful housing and oversized metal dogs, take a look at this story, The Ghosts of the Billy Goat Tavern, which touches on the same theme: Chicago is going soft, losing its edge. The Ghost story is more about Chicago’s Golden Age of Journalism passing, but it also speaks to the larger attitude of the city. To wit, “No American city has progressed as much in the past two decades as Chicago. It’s richer, cleaner, more livable, more honest, though less colorful than it was.”