Nation: Body Count

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Los Angeles may now be No. 2

To counter Chicago's boast of being the second largest U.S. city, California's boosters bragged in the '60s that Los Angeles County had more residents than Chicago's Cook County. Chicagoans windily replied that they had a more populous "consolidated metropolitan area," which they reckoned as stretching 54 miles along Lake Michigan, from Waukegan, Ill., to Hammond, Ind. Not so, said the Angelenos, who defined their "consolidated area" as including five contiguous counties of Southern California. Now, according to preliminary census figures, the argument seems to be over: Los Angeles may have gained 73,000 residents in the '70s for a total of 2,878,000, while Chicago appears to have shrunk by 644,000 to a population of 2,727,000.

Who cares? Mostly the civic leaders of Carl Sandburg's city of the big shoulders, who took the news rather badly. If the figures stay the same when the final census count lands on President Carter's desk by the deadline of Jan. 1, Chicago stands to lose one seat in Congress, several seats in the state legislature and up to $75 million in federal revenue sharing. More important, Chicago's civic pride would take a licking. Ever since A.J. Liebling, writing about Chicago in The New Yorker in 1952, coined the putdown Second City, Chicagoans have been perversely proud of it—all the more so when they could lay claim to the nation's tallest building (the Sears Tower), most durable big-city mayor (the late Richard Daley) and arguably the best symphony orchestra (under Conductor Sir Georg Solti).

While Cook County has filed suit in court challenging the preliminary census figures, city officials have begun checking the count on their own. Said Alderman Roman Pucinski, a protege of Daley's political machine, which used to be accused of casting votes for Chicagoans whether dead or alive: "The bodies are there. They are just not being counted."