What was life in Chicago like in 2000?
Twenty-five years ago in Chicago, Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex made their debut at the Field Museum, Barack Obama lost his bid for U.S. Congress and Chicagoans rang in the new year on the Red Line L train wearing celebratory glasses in the shape of “2000.”
From January to December that year, more than 200 photographers, videographers and journalists captured moments like these to create a time capsule of life in Chicago at the turn of the millennium. The project, called CITY 2000, resulted in more than 500,000 images and nearly 800 audio and video recordings, which today give us a window into the historic events and everyday life in Chicago’s 50 wards a quarter-century ago.
All of the images and recordings were donated to UIC in 2001. This year, the UIC Library is marking the 25th anniversary of the CITY 2000 project with a new digital exhibit, and a massive online catalog of digitized images and audio and video recordings from the project, now available to view through the UIC Library’s Digital Collections. An in-person exhibit is planned for fall.
A digital time capsule
The UIC Library’s “Chicago in the Year 2000” digital exhibit gives an overview of the CITY 2000 collection, which was conceived of and funded by Gary Comer, a Chicagoan and the founder of Lands’ End clothing company. Comer envisioned the project as a cultural record of “what we were, how we worked, how we lived and how we played.”
Curated by Megan Keller Young, UIC senior instructor and special collections librarian, and Josephine Newcomb, a recent graduate of the UIC’s museum and exhibition studies graduate program, “Chicago in the Year 2000” shows both public and private moments in the city. There are library patrons using now-antiquated desktop computers and teens playing a PlayStation game in their home. Youths peer inside the windows of a Blockbuster store on Division Street, and a construction worker eats lunch on a tower crane above the Park Hyatt Hotel and Condos in Streeterville. The exhibit’s span is vast.
“The Comer collection is the largest and most unique project I will likely ever work on,” said Newcomb, now at the library and archives at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. “I was able to see parts of the city I would never be privy to outside of an archive: religious events, people’s living rooms.”
Although the photos and recordings in the collection are just 25 years old, they do convey just how much has changed since that time, before widespread use of cell phones, digital photography and computers that fit on our wrists. Newcomb was just 3 years old in 2000, so viewing the archival material was an enlightening experience.
“It definitely made me nostalgic for a time that I don’t remember — seeing photos of people so enamored by, from my perspective, ancient technology, or seeing how much everyone was outside pre-social media,” she said. “Even looking at photos of people at a club or in a bus, and there isn’t a phone in sight. It all felt very intimate.
“It gave me a newfound understanding of the generations before me and the enduring culture of Chicago.”
Yet some things haven’t changed, she added.
“Twenty-five years after this project, we still wait for trains under warming lights like we are chickens in a coop. We still lay on cement by the lake with friends, and we are still proud of this city,” she said. “This collection proved to me that the city’s fabric remains the same.”
Even though Keller Young has been working on this project for nearly 10 years, she is still surprised by what she finds in the collection.
“I feel like every day that I look at it, I see something I haven’t seen yet,” she said. “There’s such a wide breadth of experiences and places that are either still around or not around anymore. There’s so many parallels to still be drawn today and 25 years ago.”
Keller Young wasn’t living in Chicago in 2000, but she still feels connected to many of the images, and others spark her interest in learning more about the city.
“Images, particularly of teenagers and kids, make me feel nostalgic about my own child- and teenager-hood,” she said. “If I have enough information about what’s depicted in the image, I often try to look up whether that building’s still standing or what happened to those people as well.”
Newcomb said she hopes the digital exhibit instills a sense of pride among Chicagoans.
“I hope it reads like a family album, because that’s what it felt like scanning through the collection,” she said. “I wanted this project to show the Chicago I know and love.”
Digitizing the collection
Although the entire collection of over 500,000 still images and 781 audio and video recordings was donated to UIC decades ago, until now, most of it was not available to view online.
In the fall of 2024, the UIC Library received a National Park Service/Institute of Museum and Library Services grant of $120,000 to digitize, preserve and make accessible the audio and video recordings from the collection, which include interviews with people who were photographed, behind-the-scenes planning of the project and commentary from Chicagoans during the 2000 election.
Many of the materials are now available on a new searchable website, UIC Library Digital Collections, and more will be added over the next year. The collection also is enhanced with metadata and audio transcripts for accessibility.
“Digitizing is an excellent way to bring historical material to a wider audience,” Keller Young said. “For the audiovisual materials, digitizing is the only way people would ever be able to view it, as many of the formats used by CITY 2000 can only be played on equipment that isn’t really in use anymore.”
In addition to Keller Young, the digitization project is managed by Kate Flynn, clinical assistant professor and digital programs and metadata project librarian, and Roberta Dupuis-Devlin, digitization manager.
“What we’ve done with the digitized content is a major refresh,” Flynn said. “We had a previous collection up, but they were all images, one by one, so you didn’t have the context of the original project.
“We recontextualized them so you can see them by project. So, for example, there’s one for when the Field Museum got Sue the T. rex. Now the photos are all together, so you can see how they go together.”
With both the still images and audio and video content online, researchers and others can find all related content in one place, Dupuis-Devlin said.
“If someone is looking at a neighborhood in Pilsen, they’ll be able to see all the interviews that may have been done with the subjects that were photographed,” she said. “I think it’s pretty exciting, and people will be able to use our tools in our content management system to do interesting and creative things.”
Nearly all the images are on film, Dupuis-Devlin said, as digital photography wasn’t widely used at the time.
“It’s really interesting to capture all of these viewpoints that are encapsulated in every format of film photography — everything from a large banquet photograph to Minox spy film to Polaroid film, you name it,” she said. “Virtually every format from the 20th century is represented, so historically, it’s really amazing to document it in this way.”
Having a wide range of photographers contributing to the project also provided access to corners of the city that aren’t seen often, Dupuis Devlin said.
“It’s really interesting just the breadth of cultures in Chicago that are represented and the very intimate photographs — whether it’s photographs of teenagers going to prom, access into services at a synagogue or a Hindu temple — all of these places,” she said. “It’s a whole different experience when you look at these images.”
Keller Young also hopes the exhibit helps viewers draw parallels from the past to today.
“The people, places and events depicted in CITY 2000 continue to influence our lives today,” she said. “Even the mundane moments are important, and everyone contributes to our shared history.”
For more information about accessing the CITY 2000 collection, contact UIC Library Special Collections and University Archives at 312-996-2742 or visit the UIC Library website.
