Twenty-five years ago in Chicago, Sue the Tyrannosaurus rex made their debut at the Field Museum, Barack Obama lost his bid for U.S. Congress and Chicagoans rang in the new year on the Red Line L train wearing celebratory glasses in the shape of “2000.”  

From January to December that year, more than 200 photographers, videographers and journalists captured moments like these to create a time capsule of life in Chicago at the turn of the millennium. The project, called CITY 2000, resulted in more than 500,000 images and nearly 800 audio and video recordings, which today give us a window into the historic events and everyday life in Chicago’s 50 wards a quarter-century ago. 

All of the images and recordings were donated to UIC in 2001. This year, the UIC Library is marking the 25th anniversary of the CITY 2000 project with a new digital exhibit, and a massive online catalog of digitized images and audio and video recordings from the project, now available to view through the UIC Library’s Digital Collections. An in-person exhibit is planned for fall.  

A digital time capsule  

The UIC Library’s “Chicago in the Year 2000” digital exhibit gives an overview of the CITY 2000 collection, which was conceived of and funded by Gary Comer, a Chicagoan and the founder of Lands’ End clothing company. Comer envisioned the project as a cultural record of “what we were, how we worked, how we lived and how we played.” 

Curated by Megan Keller Young, UIC senior instructor and special collections librarian, and Josephine Newcomb, a recent graduate of the UIC’s museum and exhibition studies graduate program, “Chicago in the Year 2000” shows both public and private moments in the city. There are library patrons using now-antiquated desktop computers and teens playing a PlayStation game in their home. Youths peer inside the windows of a Blockbuster store on Division Street, and a construction worker eats lunch on a tower crane above the Park Hyatt Hotel and Condos in Streeterville. The exhibit’s span is vast.

“The Comer collection is the largest and most unique project I will likely ever work on,” said Newcomb, now at the library and archives at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. “I was able to see parts of the city I would never be privy to outside of an archive: religious events, people’s living rooms.” 

Although the photos and recordings in the collection are just 25 years old, they do convey just how much has changed since that time, before widespread use of cell phones, digital photography and computers that fit on our wrists.­ Newcomb was just 3 years old in 2000, so viewing the archival material was an enlightening experience. 

“It definitely made me nostalgic for a time that I don’t remember — seeing photos of people so enamored by, from my perspective, ancient technology, or seeing how much everyone was outside pre-social media,” she said. “Even looking at photos of people at a club or in a bus, and there isn’t a phone in sight. It all felt very intimate.  

“It gave me a newfound understanding of the generations before me and the enduring culture of Chicago.” 

Yet some things haven’t changed, she added.  

“Twenty-five years after this project, we still wait for trains under warming lights like we are chickens in a coop. We still lay on cement by the lake with friends, and we are still proud of this city,” she said. “This collection proved to me that the city’s fabric remains the same.” 

Even though Keller Young has been working on this project for nearly 10 yea