The heaping bowl of jambalaya arrived quickly on the gray Formica counter at Wishbone’s. The lunch crowd buzzed around me — mostly business folks with a few housewives sprinkled in. Wait a minute. Business people? Housewives? Here at the corner of Washington and Morgan?

When I moved to Chicago in 1987, this bustling neighborhood was a wasteland of abandonment and dying industry. A restaurant on this spot, if it somehow could have miraculously appeared, would have been patronized more by prostitutes wandering over from under the Lake Street El.

I shook hot sauce onto the steaming entrée and thought about the unassuming television complex just a block behind me; the mecca for female TV watchers by the millions whose high priestess staked this ground when no one else would have it, fertilizing it for urban rebirth. Then, maybe even with a shudder, I entertained a thought that is anathema to most guys with even the faintest delusions of male hipness.

“Oprah,” I thought. “Way to go, Oprah.”

The Wishbone and everything around it may be the most concrete benefit that Chicago has reaped from the fact that it has been home to the Oprah Winfrey Show for the past 24 years. But as the news settles in that the wildly popular television show will tape its last season here next year, dousing its lights while its star, presumably, moves on to to other projects elsewhere, Chicagoans are left to ponder what Oprah has really meant for this city.

Jerry Roper, president and CEO of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, summed up the basics on ABC-7 News the night before Oprah’s big announcement.

“She is a Chicago icon on the level of Michael Jordan,” he said. “What that means to Chicago is, over 25 years, [there have been] a lot of eyeballs on this city. You can’t put a price tag on that.”

Lee Bey, executive director of the Chicago Area Central Committee and a former deputy chief of staff to Mayor Daley, agrees.

“The three things people talk about when you travel and tell them you are from Chicago are Michael Jordan, Mayor Daley and Oprah,” he says.

Daley himself, when he wasn’t blaming pesky reporters for driving Winfrey away with questions about her opening show shutdown of Michigan Avenue, was effusive.

“Oprah’s presence in Chicago has been a gift for two decades,” he said in a statement on November 20, the day of her announcement. “The Oprah Winfrey Show has drawn worldwide attention to our city and distinctive energy from it.”

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown says that energy is one of the things he admires about Oprah.

“I’m very impressed by Oprah and what she has created,” Brown says. “She’s made something out of nothing, or nothing but herself, and created this little economic engine in Chicago.”

Chicagoans, even those who may never have watched the show, could claim a certain pride of ownership as they watched her international star rise. Although her early television career followed a typical — albeit accelerated — path through smaller markets such as Nashville and Baltimore, her big break came here. She landed the job as host of ABC-TV’s AM Chicago in January of 1984.

It is easy to look back on a tape of her first show and say that her potential was clear. Hindsight is, after all, 20-20. But watching her standing on State Street, it must have been clear that she was more than a twittering talking head, and not merely because she was not blonde and not skinny.

“Good morning everybody,” she said confidently, with the tone of one who knows they are where they belong, even if others wonder. “I’m Oprah Winfrey, the new host of AM Chicago, and I’m thrilled to be here.”

By 1986, dominating local ratings in her time slot, the Oprah Winfrey Show began its national syndication run. She has remained the top draw, cashing in on her personality and the fact that viewers saw something other than the typical beauty queen TV host. When Oprah kvetched about her struggles to lose weight, housewives by the millions nodded in sympathy. Oprah is, and was, part preacher, part teacher, part therapist and part chatty neighbor from across the street. And her massive fame and wealth — Forbes estimates her personal fortune at $2.7 billion — only seems to intensify the nearly religious devotion of her fans. Look what Oprah did, they seem to think, and she’s just like me.

Winfrey’s show certainly put the city in a spotlight, or at least basking in the glow that shines on Winfrey. But it isn’t merely the size of Oprah’s audience that matters — about 7 million viewers daily in the last ratings report — it’s the association with her personality. Winfrey doesn’t just drive ratings, she is a cultural and marketing force. Not long after Oprah started her book club, publishers realized that sales of her selections would spike so fast that they tried desperately to find out which book she would choose next, so they could print more copies and avoid almost immediate sell-outs. An economics professor at Brigham Young University studied the “Oprah effect” on book sales and determined she had “a bigger impact on the sales of books than anything we have previously seen in literature.”

Even Chicago’s latest run on the stage of international fame — its role as home to President Barack Obama — has some traces of Oprah on it. The Obama candidacy, and Oprah’s endorsement of it, represented the first time Winfrey stepped into the political arena. Two University of Maryland professors studied the impact of her endorsement. Among other things, they mapped book sales increases from Oprah’s Book of the Month selections, and correlated those to primary election turnout increases county by county. Their conclusion: Oprah got 1,015,559 votes for Obama in the places they studied. Even rounding this number down slightly, it is still higher than the difference in votes between Obama and Hillary Clinton in those areas. Ironically, the endorsement may have pushed Winfrey’s ratings down slightly, as Republican viewers fell away. But she never lost her No. 1 spot in the ratings, which seem to be bouncing back.

More directly in Chicago, though, Oprah brings people here. There is no definitive study of how much economic activity the Oprah Winfrey Showcreates in Chicago. But even a very simple, decidedly inexpert look at the numbers shows the impact to be significant. Oprah tapes 140 shows in Chicago every year, with a studio audience of 325 for each one. Oprah Winfrey Show spokesperson Jamie Goss estimates that about two-thirds of audience members are traveling to Chicago from out of town. That means about 30,000 tourists every year, coming to see the show. Figure that each one is staying in a hotel — or at least sharing a hotel room— eating a few meals, riding a few cabs and hitting a few stores, and the dollars spent by show attendees quickly passes $15 million.

“People plan trips to Chicago just to go see the Oprah show,” says Alexandra Brook of Glenview, interviewed while she was doing some Christmas shopping. “You can’t tell me they don’t shop when they get here, or eat in restaurants and stay in hotels. I’m sure that will be missed.”

Mindy Douthit of Wilmette, also out shopping, agrees.

“People consider her part of what is Chicago. She’s certainly a tourist attraction. She’s like the tall buildings. She’s part of the city.”

Guy Nickson, co-owner of Wishbone, is in the one place in the city that may see a direct economic impact when Oprah’s show is no longer taping across the street. Nickson and his brother opened Wishbone in 1992, just after Harpo Studios opened. It was still very much a dubious neighborhood. But Oprah’s choice to set up shop there, and build a state-of-the-art studio, seemed to give nervous developers permission to test the waters.

“It defined an area in the minds of buyers, where previously it was a no-man’s land,” said Bey, who has also served as architecture critic for the Chicago Sun-Times.

“There’s unquantifiable electricity that she brings,” Nickson said. “She was a magnet that put us on the map.”

Most seem to agree that the West Loop neighborhood has developed to the point that the loss of the show won’t hurt too much. And Harpo Studios will still be in business there, taping other shows. As for the city as a whole, the loss will be more psychological and hard to define.

“I think between this and losing the Olympics, people are just feeling a little blue,” Nickson said. “Chicagoans have always had that ‘second city’ mentality.”

Bey is philosophical.

“There was a Chicago before Oprah got here,” he says. “And there will be a Chicago after she is gone. Maybe it will lose just a little bit of its luster. But it will still be Chicago.”

Brown says, “We’ll live.”

John Carpenter, a former Chicago Sun-Times reporter, is a Chicago-based freelance writer.

Illinois Issues, January 2010