[Cicero]

I'm sorry fresh, I don't see 160K as much anymore. I've lived in small town Illinois (several), and I do know that news coming out of the high schools is big news there. The quarterbacks of the High School teams are also big news, as they are posted upon entering and leaving the towns. I also visited champaign during high school choir and soccer championships. We called it "cham-plain". lol sorry...

Chicago I'm afraid, cannot really be likened to the rest of Illinois in sophistication and in numbers. Which is why my friends from that state left places like that and went on in to Chicago and St. Louis after leaving High School or the University.

I've lived in small and large places fresh, and I will tell you, that small town is also an attitude that people carry, outside of the qualifiers and suspicious lack of real numbers that you also cited.

Chicago: somewhere around 2,000,000.
Aurora: somewhere around 170,000
Naperville: somewhere around 140,000 (according to city data)

Being the 3rd largest in a state of 12 mil. does not make you large. It also depends on how the population is dispersed.

But again, I thought Colorado Springs was a small town (to medium)when I lived there, and it was at 350 or 400,000.

Sorry to say it's a small town. But it's a small town. It's not exactly "city" material for those of us who have lived outside of the townships, and are in, or have lived in large cities in the united states and throughout the world. You might be surprised how small it is when you go elsewhere.