Built in 1929, Chicago Stadium was the crowning achievement of local sports promoter Paddy Harmon. The largest sports arena in the world when it was built, the stadium was completed at a total cost of $9.5 million. The "Madhouse on Madison" witnessed an active 65-year reign as the city's greatest auditorium. Home to both the Chicago Blackhawks and the Chicago Bulls, the stadium's attendance eclipsed that of others around the nation as it hosted numerous boxing matches, the first playoff game of the National Football League, rodeo competitions, and concerts (featuring Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and later KISS) among other events. Chicago Stadium fell to the wrecking ball in 1995.

Sports fans nationwide know Soldier Field as the home of the Chicago Bears. For decades its signature columns provided an iconic backdrop for gridiron matches. But few realize that the stadium has been much more than that. Soldier Field: A Stadium and Its City explores how this amphitheater evolved from a public war memorial into a majestic arena that helped define Chicago. Chicago Tribune staff writer Liam Ford led the reporting on the stadium’s controversial 2003 renovation—and simultaneously found himself unearthing a dramatic history. As he tells it, the tale of Soldier Field truly is the story of Chicago, filled with political intrigue and civic pride. Designed by Holabird and Roche, Soldier Field arose through a serendipitous combination of local tax dollars, City Beautiful boosterism, and the machinations of Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson. The result was a stadium that stood at the center of Chicago’s political, cultural, and sporting life for nearly sixty years before the arrival of Walter Payton and William “The Refrigerator” Perry. Ford describes it all in the voice of a seasoned reporter: the high school football games, track and field contests, rodeos, and even NASCAR races. Photographs, including many from the Chicago Park District’s own collections, capture these remarkable scenes: the swelling crowds at ethnic festivals, Catholic masses, and political rallies. Few remember that Soldier Field hosted Billy Graham and Martin Luther King Jr., Judy Garland and Johnny Cash—as well as Grateful Dead’s final show. Soldier Field captures the dramatic history of Chicago’s stadium on the lake and will captivate sports fans and historians alike.

A must-have keepsake for Blackhawks fans of all ages, this souvenir provides the opportunity to celebrate the life of the greatest hockey player in Chicago's history. One of the most charismatic and electrifying athletes of his or any era, Bobby Hull thrilled fans with his unique combination of speed, skill, and grace and his electrifying career is highlighted in this biography where he traces his life from his days as a youngster learning to skate on the Bay of Quinte to his current role as a Blackhawks ambassador. Throughout the book, beautiful photos reflect on Hull's greatest moments, including amassing a team-record 604 career goals, collecting three Art Ross trophies as the league's leading scorer, earning Lord Stanley's Cup and a championship ring in 1961, and being inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1983. Featuring hundreds of rare, full-color photos from his personal archive and accompanying text from legendary Chicago sports columnist and Blackhawks team historian Bob Verdi, The Golden Jet gives Hull's millions of fans a never-before-seen glimpse into the life of this hockey icon. Bringing the pictures to life is an exclusive commemorative DVD, which includes highlights, interviews, and behind-the-scenes clips from the Blackhawks' video library.

Established less than 200 years ago, Chicago has seen a lot of living in that short span of time. Burned to the ground early on, it’s been frozen and just recently flooded. Tucked away in the Midwest, it still rivals both coasts with its food, entertainment, and cultural venues. Chicago’s Most Wanted™: The Top 10 Book of Murderous Mobsters, Midway Monsters, and Windy City Oddities takes you on a tour of that toddlin’ town with dozens of top-ten lists containing memorable minutiae and delightful details. Laura L. Enright will blow you away with this collection of amusing and amazing facts about the Windy City. One would be hard-pressed to decide what Chicago is most famous for. Is it disasters, such as the Great Chicago Fire? Or perhaps gangsters are its calling card, with Al Capone at the head? Maybe it’s the politics, with “Hizzoner, da Mayor” and stories of votes coming from the dead. Or do sports come to mind first, like the Cubs’ dismal failures—some say due to a decades-old curse—and the glory days of da Bulls and da Bears? Whatever it is that makes Chicago, it’s in Chicago’s Most Wanted™. The famous and the infamous, festivals and food, blues and jazz, and so much more are all included in this collection of fascinating and often humorous trivia tidbits. Frank Sinatra rhapsodized that Chicago “won’t let you down,” and neither will Laura L. Enright’s Chicago’s Most Wanted™!

Sport is seen as an increasingly important aspect of urban and regional planning. Related programmes have moved to the forefront of agendas for cities of the present and future. This has occurred as the barriers between so-called ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture continue to disintegrate. Sport is now a key component within strategies for the cultural regeneration of cities and regions, a tendency with mixed outcomes - at times fostering genuinely democratic arrangements, at others pseudo-democratic arrangements, whereby political, business and cultural elites manipulate a sense of sameness and unity among their fellow citizens to smooth the path for the pursuit of what are actually vested interests. Almost any active enactment of a ‘sports city of culture’ risks divisiveness. Recognizing controversies, with both potentially positive and negative outcomes, this book examines sport within contexts of urban and regional regeneration, via a number of rather different case studies. Within these studies, the role of sport stadium development, franchise expansion and sports-fan (and anti-sport) activism is addressed and articulated with issues concerning, inter alia, public funding, environmental impact, urban infrastructure and citizen identity. The ‘sport in the city’ project commenced as a research symposium held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and number of the essays originate from this occasion. This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.