Ad Categories: City Life

In August, Shapiro takes over the city’s most influential theater, where she’s proved her mettle as an ensemble member for two decades.

Despite spending half the year—and $150,000 personally—on a losing battle against the retention of Illinois Supreme Court justice Lloyd Karmeier, Chicago’s fiercest personal injury litigator still has his hand in big cases, including the City Hall ride-sharing ordinance.  

Arriving at City Hall with a political pedigree and bigtime financial connections, he’s been on a barnstorming tour of all 77 community areas to tout his plans for local investment. A preview of a political campaign to come?

He seems to have worked out most of Ventra’s bugs after its disastrous 2013 rollout, and the dreaded rehab of the Red Line on the South Side finished on time and, miraculously, on budget.

Of course, he is only as powerful as Tom Ricketts (No. 41) allows him to be, but it takes more than the boss’s money to make the savvy moves Epstein did this off-season.

For more than a decade, Stasch held the MacArthur Foundation’s purse strings, doling out billions. Now, after Robert Gallucci’s departure last July, she oversees everything.

With last summer’s merger of Northwestern and Cadence Health, Harrison now runs a four- hospital system (1,600 beds, 19,500 employees) with $3 billion in total revenue.

Now that the Deerfield-based chain has completed its 2012 megamerger with the European pharmacy giant Alliance Boots, the ex–McDonald’s CEO becomes the executive chairman of Walgreens Boots Alliance, an empire of 12,800 stores in 25 countries.

With the publishing industry suffering, this magazine mogul has taken shrewd steps: expanding Ebony’s and Jet’s presence online and on mobile devices and mining the archives of classic photos and covers to create T-shirts and framed art for sale.

At a time when celebrity chefs are turning to fried chicken, tacos, and burgers, Duffy brings refinement back: tablecloths, prix fixe menus, uncommon ingredients, and wine pairings. All this and three Michelin stars in only two years.