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Chicago Carless

This native New Yorker preaches the gospel of downtown Chicago living.

Monday Oct 02, 2006.     By Jessica Herman

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Mike Doyle of Chicago Carless is like a born-again Chicagoan. In 2003, after six Brooklyn-Chicago-trips in three months, he was converted. He quit his job, threw everything in an SUV and got a friend to drive him to the city of big shoulders. "And I've never looked back," says the New York native, who never learned to drive.

He started his blog in early summer 2005, right before migrating from Logan Square to downtown because (besides being a loud-mouthed, opinionated New Yorker) he saw it as a blind-spot in the public eye. Issues get ignored and people are seen as nameless, faceless numbers. But for Doyle, it's small-town-America-meets-urban-mecca.

"I wanted there to be evidence that there are people living downtown who think it's normal, and they love to talk about it," he says.

What's the gist of your blog?
That downtown Chicago is one of the best places to live in urban America. It's a wonderful, maddening, loyalty-inducing experience that, even today, a lot of Chicagoans still don't really understand.

If I read your blog today, gimme one thing I'd learn.
That downtown can truly be considered HOME. Thousands of people live down here and are very emotionally attached to the place. You never hear that perspective in the local media, but it's not just people who live on leafy suburban streets who love their neighborhoods. I started writing Carless to help get that message out.

My computer is surrounded by...
Nice, clean, retentively ordered desk space. And cat hair.

How do you pay the bills?
I commute 12 minutes on foot (including elevator time) to do property research and public outreach for a conservation organization in the Loop.

When you aren't loving blogging, you're loving BLANK in Chicago.
How astoundingly affordable a good quality-of-life is here. For what it costs me to live in the heart of downtown Chicago, back in my hometown of NYC I couldn't pay for a cardboard box an hour's subway ride away from Manhattan.

Name a local blogger extraordinaire.
Devyn Caldwell and his "Looper" photoblog. In two years' blogging, he's put together the best photographic record of downtown Chicago since the great mid-century work of Charles Cushman.

Jessica Herman likes peeking into other folks' lives, which sure helps when she's grilling hip Chicago bloggers. If you'd like to shower a little love on a local blogger whose antics and anecdotes are your favorite flavor of procrastination, shoot her an email.