Have you ever actually been to Hammond?

     Do you know why Marshall Field's was renamed Macy's? Federated could have kept the Field's name after the 2005 acquisition — it's still on plaques on the downtown flagship store anyway. I happened to be on the editorial board when the new owners came by to ballyhoo the change.
     To save money on bags. If they kept "Field's," they'd need separate Field's bags, plus distinct advertising. That would cost money. Changing Field's to Macy's was simpler and cheaper.
     For them. For us, well, if it left customers alienated and heartbroken, welcome to capitalism.
     This came to mind as the Chicago Bears edge closer to moving to Hammond, Indiana. Prestige is trumped by parsimony. Sears fled the tallest building in the world in the heart of Chicago for a sprawling business park in Hoffman Estates. In the end, it didn't save them.
     I was resigned to accept Arlington Heights, even to welcome it. I myself am a suburbanite with city pretensions, the Chicago newspaper columnist living in a leafy suburban paradise. Life happens.
     But Hammond? I'm reluctant to register an opinion about Hammond, since it is filled with fine people, including loyal Chicago Sun-Times subscribers, all with interesting, rich lives. Laudable individuals, fully capable of writing angry letters to newspaper editors, explaining how wounded they are by the opinions of some clueless hack.
     So let me stipulate that I visited Hammond once, nearly five years ago, for two hours, and my opinion is based entirely on that visit. I am not the Jedi Council, nor the all-seeing eye. It was an initial impression.
     A... young man of my acquaintance was about to spend a year working as a humble clerk for the federal judiciary in Hammond. Taking a preliminary trip with this unnamed person to the city in question seemed the act of a loving... umm... associate. So I volunteered. He was planning to live on the near South Side of Chicago and commute.
     "Why not live in Hammond?" I suggested, breezily, as we drove. On my blog, I described our arrival this way:

     "Now Hammond, Indiana is not a garden spot of the world. Modest apartment buildings and town houses, homes, low industrial buildings, a trailer park as soon as you exit the freeway. A lot of liquor stores and cigarette stores and fireworks stores. Not poor, exactly, not prosperous either. Proudly hanging on. My mission was to go to the federal courthouse, a large brutalist gray concrete structure that could be used in a James Bond movie for the secret police headquarters in Bulgaria and the audience wouldn't blink."

     Looking for a spot to eat lunch near the courthouse, a sense of the area started to sink in.
     "What I said about living in Hammond, I retract," I said. "I don't even want you stopping for gas here."

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