My small South Side neighborhood gave us civil rights leader Malcolm X; Sherry Lansing, who ran Paramount as the first woman to head a major film studio; reporter Seymour Hersh of The New York Times; Larry Ellison of software-maker Oracle; and social critic Shelby Steele. And the blues, the indigenous music that came up the Mississippi, remains the music of the world. It is, of course, the music of Black Americans, but it’s insufficient to think about the adjective; its creators were Americans who defined our country to the world. Chicagoans invented the skyscraper, and architectural geniuses Adler & Sullivan, Holabird & Root, and Frank Lloyd Wright felt the identity of beauty and utility and created what was called the First American City. Much of their works remain. And others, Burnham and Root’s Monadnock Building still stuns the eye with its grace. Often overlooked as an architectural achievement is our McCormick Place. Notable for its structural as well as political audacity. Built at great cost, the world’s first super convention center opened in 1960 under Mayor Richard J. Daley, went up in flames in 1967 and was rebuilt. That’s the Chicago Way.  Take it how you will. The South Side also gave us the phenomenon of improvisational and stand-up comedy, which are now the major entertainment forms of the world. The Second City and its beneficiaries began as The Compass Players at the University of Chicago, and Lord Richard Buckley, court jester to Al Capone, is a historic instance of stand-up. The transformative American literature of the 20th century was written of Chicago and/or by Chicagoans: Richard Wright, Willa Cather, Gwendolyn Brooks, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, B. Traven, Theodore Dreiser, Nelson Algren, Ernest Hemingway. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur wrote the Broadway hit “The Front Page,” based on their experiences as reporters for the city’s many newspapers, creating the dramatic form of the gang comedy on stage and film. H.L. Mencken crowned Chicago “the literary capital of the United States” in 1920. Lorraine Hansberry and I wrote plays that, after the endorsement of New York, became transformational American standards. Editorial: Welcome home, Lorraine Hansberry Other South Side achievements include the modern economics of Thorstein Veblen and Milton Friedman and, coincidentally, the Atomic Age, whose first controlled chain reaction took place under the U. of C.’s Stagg Field. Modern merchandising began with the mail order house of our Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward. They employed the then-new technologies in postal delivery, as their descendant innovators use the internet today, and changed the ways we shopped. The culture of the Western world is American, which is to say Chicagoan. The two greatest sports phenomena of modern times are Michael Jordan and the Cubs, a team so courteous that it waited 108 years to assert their right to a title. Buddy Guy outside the Checkerboard Lounge on Sept. 9, 1974, at 423 E. 43rd St. in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood. (Jack Dykinga/Chicago Tribune) The South Side, of Bessie Coleman, Jesse Binga and Muddy Waters as well as of the Club DeLisa, Buddy Guy, Bricktop Recording and the Savoy Ballroom, today has one of the highest rates of violent crime in America. Tammany Hall’s William “Boss” Tweed, Louisiana’s Huey Long and Kansas City’s Pendergast machine may have been less colorful than the Chicago 1st Ward antics of Michael “Hinky Dink” Kenna and John “Bathhouse John” Coughlin, but they all prove that machine politics have always been the engine of our cities. The go-along-to-get-along worked — for the preferred groups — with the complacency or fear of the excluded and the approval of beneficiaries. But machine politics are now national. Mayor Richard J. Daley silenced dissentient City Council members by turning off their microphones, and readers may finish the comparison to the legacy media. American cities are dying. Chicago’s current marvel is not innovation and prosperity, but murder and crime. The decay of the machine-run cities may or may not be inevitable, but it is arrestable. The citizens and descendants of those who created the American century can vote for a return to a deserved civic pride and common sense. David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright from Chicago.  Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].