'Cities have to do it themselves'.

Returning to Chicago for only the third time in thirty-one years brought back memories of working, studying, and playing in the Loop, that distinctive business district of screeching El trains, tall buildings, and biting winter winds.

Of course, memories exist larger than life. In reality, Chicago, especially its Loop, teetered in 1973. Buildings seemed to sag. Streets felt claustrophobic. The hustle and bustle that characterize vigorous manifestations of commerce and industry had become drudgery. Carl Sandburg's "city of the big shoulders" slouched under the weight of its age.

Ten years later, Lee Bey told those attending the Chicago convention, Chicago stood at the brink of failure; in fact, it was all but dead and buried.

It's no easy task for a city center as dense as The Loop to throw off the weight of its age, but Chicago has reinvented, as Bey, director of media and governmental affairs for the architectural firm of Skidmore Owings & Merrill, showed.

Bey's session at the convention provided the key to "Creating or Revitalizing Your Own Urban Renaissance": reach inside to find and nurture what is best.

"Harold Washington realized that if a city wants to revive," Bey said, "it needs to do it itself." Washington, mayor from 1983 until his death in 1987, set into motion a revitalization effort that has come to full flower under Mayor Richard M. Daley, first elected in 1989.

This do-it-yourself method has served the city well. As Bey noted in his talk: "Daley said find an undeveloped jewel in a neighborhood and bring it up."

Jewels existed throughout the downtown area. East of Michigan Avenue and south of the Chicago River, land that once sprawled with railroad tracks and warehouses sprouts high-rise residential units. All along the riverfront, new buildings rose and older ones received extensive remodeling. Even when a revitalization effort faltered, it spurred others to act.

Block 37 had been torn down during the 1980s, Bey explained, but efforts to create something new on the site went nowhere. Today, Block 37 remains an empty lot enclosed by a fence. Yet, the streets around Block 37 began to come back for a very simple reason, Bey said: "When there's confidence in a city, people start investing in their property."

But confidence does not come merely by building new high rises. Confidence comes when people can see and experience the vibrancy around them.

Enter Millennium Park, which opened in July. Twenty-five acres of green space and walkways and a Frank Ghery-designed bandshell give people reason not merely to visit downtown, but to linger.

Millennium Park came about, Bey said, from the wish to bring back a dead area of the city, to help revitalize the South Michigan Avenue area, and to provide a place for activity rather than a static place merely to sit. But it has accomplished far more, Bey said; it has brought residents to the area, and it has helped restore the hustle and bustle to State Street, the hub of downtown Chicago.

Understanding the city's revitalization, most notably revealed in the gleaming skyline of Chicago's Loop, requires more than words of explanation; it must be experienced. The city's new found energy does more than invigorate and motivate--it makes Chicago the showcase city of the new millennium.

Richard Larsen is a deputy opinion page editor for the Ventura County Star in California E-mail: [e-mail]