Ad Categories: City Life

Just call him the union whisperer. Last year, he hammered out both a crucial firefighter contract and the first police deal to pass without an arbiter since 1996.

Goodman’s fast-growing real estate firm is taking over the West Loop, gobbling up properties and building new offices for Uber, Twitter, Google, and Ideo. 

The head and face of public arts in the city has a big year ahead: in April, the new four-day Lake FX Summit + Expo; in October, the launch of the Chicago Architecture Biennial.

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.