On the first floor, I met a South African, a Native American and a woman from Mexico. The Census Bureau didn’t ask about citizenship, but it asked for ethnicity, and most people identified themselves by their home countries. In a single building, I found eight nationalities, and every shading of humanity from John O’Groats to the Equator. This week, the Census Bureau ranked Chicago the third most segregated metropolitan area in the U.S., but working the Rogers Park neighborhood, in the upper-right hand corner of the city, I went around the world.

Chicago’s famed racial segregation goes back nearly a century. When blacks arrived here from Mississippi and Alabama to build weapons for the World War I doughboys, they were forced to live in a narrow strip of land known as the Black Belt. The ghetto finally burst open in the 1950s and ’60s, consuming most of the South and West sides, despite Mayor Richard J. Daley’s efforts to hold back the tide by crowding blacks into housing projects and walling off their neighborhoods with highways. The city is roughly a third white, a third black and a third Hispanic, but most Chicagoans live in neighborhoods no more diverse than Ireland, Nigeria or Mexico. In some places, you can drive under a viaduct and see the world turn a different color. Chicago’s greatest monument to segregation is a 12-foot-tall berm that carries the Burlington Northern Railroad through the Southwest Side. It separates Lawndale, a once-Jewish neighborhood that “turned” in the 1950s, from Little Village, an old Eastern European neighborhood that is now Hispanic. The Poles and Ukrainians established the tracks as a racial barrier, especially after Lawndale went up in flames following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination. The custom has persisted with the new residents: South of the tracks, it’s 97 percent Hispanic; on the other side of the tracks, it’s 89 percent black.

In other places, the segregation is less obvious. In a two-mile stretch between the North Side and the West Side, the average household income drops $100,000. But no whites ever travel those two miles, except to buy heroin.

Chicago’s index of dissimilarity — the percentage of the population that would have to move in order to achieve perfect integration — is 75.2. The most segregated cities are all in the industrial North, which have similar histories of black migration. The racial attitudes and immigrant fears of the 20th century made it impossible for Chicago to grow up as an integrated city. Given the times, segregation wasn’t even all bad: Inside the Black Belt, African-Americans elected their own congressman before any other community in the country. That led to black senators, and a black president. And Daley’s strict racial boundaries prevented whites from abandoning the city entirely, as they did in Detroit.

But here’s the other side of segregation: It provides the population to create integrated neighborhoods, which doesn’t exist in Bozeman, Mont., or Burlington, Vt., or other monochromatic cities that didn’t make that Top 10 list. The tag “segregated city” is misleading because within those cities are streets where whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians mix as nowhere else in the world. In this century, integration is not only possible, it’s inevitable, and it’s happening most dramatically in the cities with the longest history of segregation. The traditional ethnic enclaves may just be necessary way stations toward the multi-ethnic community where I knocked on doors last spring.

I’d always wanted to be a census enumerator. I had a friend who did it in 1990, and it sounded like my kind of job. You set your own hours. You didn’t have a boss watching all day. You got a badge that allowed you to peek inside strangers’ apartments. Plus, your work became part of American history. Enumerators worked their own neighborhoods. I knew, just from living here 13 years, that Rogers Park was like the Epcot Center with more authentic West Indian restaurants. But now I was part of a crew collecting the numbers. As many as we could get. Outside a building with yellow grass and empty Cheetos bags in the courtyard, I was blocked by a gate with a broken intercom. This was on a low-income street known colloquially as the Juneway Jungle or, even more colloquially, “The Jungle.” I called the management company number bolted to the brick wall.

“This is the Census Bureau. I need someone to let me in your building.”

“We don’t have time to send anyone over,” an irritated woman with a European accent said. “Why don’t you just mail people a form?”

“We did that. We’re trying to find the people who didn’t send their forms back.”

“WELL, HAS IT OCCURRED TO YOU THEY MIGHT NOT WANT TO PARTICIPATE?” she snapped.

“Ma’am,” I said, “this is the Census. We have to count everyone. It’s in the Constitution.”

I envied rural and suburban enumerators, who didn’t have to talk their way into high-rises. They also didn’t look out of place wearing a tie. (“This ain’t a good day to be sellin’ insurance!” someone had shouted, as I walked to my addresses. I flipped my satchel to show I was “the census man.”) Three minutes later, I followed a tenant into the courtyard. It was the government’s good fortune that the locks on the exterior doors were broken, too, so I could pester everyone in the building right on their doorsteps. That beat an intercom. It’s easy to get information out of people when you wave a federal ID in their faces. As a young newspaper reporter, I’d developed the abrasive nosiness required to interview a murder victim’s mother. Now, I was using that skill for a noble purpose: preventing Texas from stealing more Midwestern congressional seats.

Census Tract 101, Chicago, Ill., came in with a population of 4,854 — 49 percent black, 31 percent white, 13 percent Hispanic and 3 percent multiracial. My census tract was not even the most integrated corner of Rogers Park. That would be Tract 205, which is a ridiculously balanced 26 percent white, 19 percent black, 25 percent Hispanic and 27 percent Asian. It’s bordered by the Indo-Pak-Jewish strip of Devon Avenue, where a billboard for Taco Bell shrimp tacos rises across the street from Tel Aviv Kosher Bakery. Which is near Casey’s Corner tavern. Which is near a halal meat market that reeks of urine voided by terrified chickens and rabbits.

Devon Avenue is the most all-American street I know, but it certainly doesn’t look like all of America, or all of Chicago. So how did it happen?

One of the elders at my Presbyterian Church has been a member for 49 years, since Rogers Park was 99 percent white.

“When I joined, we had 500 members,” she told me last Sunday. “They were mostly Anglo-Saxon, upper-middle income. But over the years, the neighborhood changed.”

Rogers Park was always an immigrant neighborhood, but in the first half of the 20th century, most immigrants came from Europe. In the 1960s and ’70s, Rogers Park was colonized by newcomers from Eastern Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean and South Asia, as well as hippies and lower-class blacks, all looking for cheap apartments. They crowded into buildings like the Van Dorn, as the old-line WASPs, Germans, Luxembourgers and Jews moved to the suburbs. A series of geographic and demographic quirks has preserved Rogers Park’s diversity. It’s one of the few Chicago neighborhoods with lakefront property, and white people love to live near the water.

My landlord, who devoted his life to sailing, bought a building overlooking Lake Michigan in 1962, when Rogers Park was in its all-white prime. He installed a telescope in the living room, so he could watch sailboats and ore freighters, and never thought of moving.

“I look out at that lake every day,” he once said to me. “It gets into your spirit.”

 There’s also a colony of Orthodox Jews, who stay in the city so they can walk to shul.

But Rogers Park is a long, wearying train ride from downtown, which means the inland blocks remain affordable to everyone, even as the rest of the North Side has gentrified. (I washed up here after a more centrally located residence was converted to “luxury apartments.”)

Our street, which is part of the same census tract as the Van Dorn and the Juneway Jungle, is mostly white. So even where there’s integration, there’s segregation. But our street is also the home of a world-famous African-American athlete whose name you would recognize, if I could reveal it without breaking my census-taker’s oath. And the couple living downstairs from me is interracial. So even where there’s segregation, there’s integration.

In most parts of town, Chicago deserves its reputation as the third-most segregated city in America. But in some places, it’s more complicated.

But the city he inherits, though perhaps more beautiful than ever after years of extensive urban improvements, is in financial straits that it hasn’t seen since before Daley’s father, Mayor Richard J. Daley, came to power in the 1950s.

“Not since the Great Depression have the finances of the city been this precarious,” said Dominic Pacyga, a historian and author of “Chicago: A Biography.” The city’s next budget deficit could again exceed $500 million, mostly the result of reduced tax revenue from the recession, and could reach $1 billion if the city properly funds its pension system.

Emanuel, who takes office May 16, also faces a fractious political landscape.

He’ll have to find new leadership for the struggling public school system, as two top interim executives plan to leave. He’ll also need a new police chief, having said he would not renew Police Superintendent Jody Weis’ contract. The department is suffering from low morale and staffing estimated at 1,000 officers below previous levels.

Members of the City Council, including a number elected Tuesday, have made clear they will demand more authority after years of domination by Daley.

In 25 years of public life, Emanuel has earned a reputation as a skilled politician and as a political operative, serving in both the Clinton and Obama administrations and as a congressman from Chicago. But the mayor’s office will test his mettle as an executive.

Throughout the campaign, Emanuel has acknowledged he’ll have to make budget cuts, and has promised to spread the pain as fairly as possible, starting with his own office.

But, like the other candidates, he has been vague about how he’ll accomplish the reductions. And nothing he has suggested comes close to the projected deficit.

Emanuel said he can save $110 million by streamlining “outdated and duplicative work processes to focus on front-line service delivery,” according to his campaign. His campaign did not use the word “layoffs,” but it did allude to “reducing layers of management bureaucracy and consolidating redundant tasks.”

“What comes next is a bunch of ugly,” said Ralph Martire, executive director of the bipartisan Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. “It’s going to be a brutal budget year and there are not quick and easy fixes.”

The politics of the cuts could be perilous. Most of the deficit is in the $3.1 billion general fund, which pays for the police and fire departments, which have been cut significantly since 2000, Martire said.

As for the underfunded pensions, Emanuel said he wants to “preserve” the pensions but may seek to negotiate changes. He insists the city can solve the problems without a confrontation like the one in Wisconsin, where tens of thousands of people have been demonstrating outside the Capitol to protest anti-union budget cut legislation. “We have to find, I think, common ground and a sense of hope,” he said during a campaign stop this week.

Still, some Chicago officials say the pensions will be hard to finesse. “This mayor is going to have to find a way to balance that too, in a way that doesn’t alienate our city workers, who are incredibly hardworking folks,” said Alderman Sandi Jackson.

Already, various unions are bracing for a fight. More than a half dozen unions endorsed Chico, including the police and fire unions.

Emanuel has also talked about expanding the city sales tax to include more services, while lowering its overall rate, but he’ll need approval from the state General Assembly.

Many voters hope Emanuel’s clout in national politics will help him find outside avenues for help. President Obama expressed support for Emanuel when he left the White House, and heavy hitters in the political and entertainment communities contributed to his campaign.

“He’s (got) political savvy. He’s politically tied in. That’s important to me because he can get things done,” said Ralph Vallot, 57, dean of students at a Chicago high school.

Loren Miller, 65, who is retired and served as an election judge at a Michigan Avenue polling place, said it’s a turning point for the city. “The future’s going to be interesting. This is going to be a tough period of time for the city,” Miller said.

Associated Press writer Deanna Bellandi contributed to this report.

Emanuel’s pending success is noteworthy when you consider the struggles that other chiefs of staff have faced when they’ve tried to enter (or reenter) elected politics after leaving the White House.

Those who have failed to make the leap include Erskine Bowles (a Clinton chief of staff), who waged futile Senate bids in North Carolina in 2002 and 2004; Hamilton Jordan (Carter, who lost a 1986 Democratic Senate primary to Wyche Fowler in Georgia;  and Al Haig (Nixon), who dropped out of the 1988 Republican presidential race after finishing with 0 percent in Iowa. You could also make a case for including Donald Rumsfeld (Ford), who seemed ready to seek the ’88 GOP presidential nod but who was marginalized by his old Ford-era  enemy, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush; and Andrew Card (Bush 43), who showed interest in running for office (for Ted Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat or for governor) but opted not to, likely because of the grief his Bush association would cause him in blue state Massachusetts.

The success stories include Dick Cheney, who parlayed his Ford White House gig into a successful U.S. House campaign in Wyoming in 1978; and Jim Jones (LBJ), who went on to serve seven terms in the House from Oklahoma from 1973 to 1987, ending his career with a losing Senate campaign against Republican Don Nickles. Barring a completely unforeseen development (another residency challenge?!), Rahm Emanuel will soon be joining their ranks.

“This is a critical election for the future of the city of Chicago. We’re at a crossroads,” front-runner Rahm Emanuel said as he greeted commuters at a South Side train station.

The campaign began last fall when Daley — with his wife ailing, six terms under his belt, and a future of fiscal challenges facing Chicago — announced he wouldn’t seek re-election.

The candidates who rushed in to fill that void included Emanuel, President Barack Obama’s former chief of staff; former U.S. Sen. Carol Moseley Braun; former Chicago public schools president Gery Chico; and City Clerk Miguel del Valle.

Emanuel led in the polls and in fundraising since he announced he was running last fall, and his confident, no-nonsense style resonated with many voters. Chico finished second in most of the polls, ahead of Braun and del Valle but far behind Emanuel.

To win Tuesday, a candidate must secure more than 50 percent of the vote, or face a runoff against the second place finisher on April 5.

Whoever wins will give the city a mayor unlike any it has had before: Emanuel would be Chicago’s first Jewish mayor, Braun would be its first black woman mayor, and Chico or del Valle would be the city’s first Hispanic mayor.

Justin Blake, a 42-year-old black general contractor who chatted with Emanuel on Tuesday, said voting for him was a no-brainer because of Emanuel’s “knowledge of what’s going on, not only here locally but worldwide.

“He’s been right up there with the president; why wouldn’t you vote for somebody who’s got that much collateral behind him?” Blake said.

Mark Arnold, 23, an auditor voting at a downtown polling place, said he is excited at the prospect of change.

“I think Daley’s done a lot of good things, but at the same time I just feel like the city right now, it’s kind of like a good old boys’ club,” Arnold said, saying the election would bring in “someone with new ideas who’s been in other places.”

Daley has been criticized for allowing the city to spend beyond its means, and Chicago’s finances were further damaged by the economic downturn of the last few years. The new mayor will have to quickly decide on a politically unpalatable strategy for improving city finances that may well involve raising taxes and cutting services and public employee benefits.

The five-month campaign took many unusual turns, even for a city where voting from six feet under is part of election lore. But after a race that included a challenge of Emanuel’s right to call himself a Chicagoan going all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court and Braun accusing another candidate of being strung out on crack cocaine, some voters complained they had not heard enough about where the candidates stood on the issues.

Some said they were focused more on the candidates’ resumes and influence.

“Daley had connections,” said Terrence Trampiets, 66, a North Side resident intending to vote for Emanuel. “You have to have that to get things done.”

Daley’s lock on City Hall had left many voters complacent. His decision at age 68 not to run again unleashed a sudden flurry of potential interest in running from nearly two dozen politicians, including the county sheriff, congressmen, state lawmakers and members of the City Council.

But the campaign focus quickly shifted from City Hall to the White House when Emanuel announced he was interested in the job — weeding many lesser-known candidates in the process.

That was followed by a sometimes weird tussle over whether Emanuel was a city resident and therefore even eligible to run because he had not lived in Chicago for a full year before the election, as required by law. He had lived in Washington working for Obama since soon after giving up his North Side congressmen’s seat in 2008.

The residency challenge turned into a spectacle that saw Emanuel on a Board of Elections witness stand in a makeshift courtroom in the basement of a downtown building being grilled for a dozen hours by regular Chicago residents with some very irregular questions, such as one from a man who asked if Emanuel had been involved in the 1993 Branch Davidian siege at Waco, Texas, when he worked for the Clinton administration.

Several tense days followed when an appellate court ordered Emanuel’s name thrown off the ballot, before the state’s Supreme Court stepped in and definitively ruled that Emanuel was a resident and could indeed run for mayor. Until then, Emanuel’s rivals had painted him as an outsider.

Meanwhile, a group of African-American leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, decided that their best hope of electing a black mayor was to convince all but one of the major black candidates to drop out of the race. Both U.S. Rep. Danny Davis and State Sen. James Meeks, the pastor of a megachurch on Chicago’s South Side, ended their candidacies and threw their support behind Braun.

The city’s first black mayor was Harold Washington, who was elected in 1983. The first woman mayor was Jane Byrne, elected in 1979.

The black consensus effort marked a return to the spotlight for Braun, who last won election in 1992 when she became the first African-American woman to win a U.S. Senate seat. She had largely been out of the spotlight since she announced a longshot bid for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004.

But Braun made headlines when, after rival Patricia Van Pelt-Watkins wondered aloud at a debate about Braun’s absence from public life, Braun shot back that the reason Van Pelt-Watkins didn’t know what she’d been up to was that she had been “strung out on crack.”

Van Pelt-Watkins said afterward she’d had a drug problem years ago, but denied ever using crack, and Braun later apologized. But she often showed sharp elbows during the campaign, in particular during exchanges with Emanuel. Some polls had her stuck in single digits or the teens while Emanuel scored well above 40 percent.

The other two main candidates, Chico and del Valle, have throughout the campaign struggled to get media attention, in large part because the fight over Emanuel’s residency took center stage. A sixth candidate, William “Dock” Walls, is also running.

Associated Press writer Lindsey Tanner contributed to this report.

Democrats on the run in Wisconsin avoided state troopers Friday and threatened to stay in hiding for weeks, potentially paralyzing the state government in a standoff with majority Republicans over union rights for public employees.

The party’s battle against balancing the state budget by cutting the pay, benefits and collective bargaining rights of public workers is the boldest action yet by Democrats to push back against last fall’s GOP wave.

But the dramatic strategy that has clogged the Capitol with thousands of protesters clashes with one essential truth: Republicans told everyone months ago that unions would be one of their targets, and the GOP now has more than enough votes to pass its plans once the Legislature can convene.

The 14 Senate Democrats left the state Thursday, delaying action in that chamber on the sweeping bill. Among them was Sen. Jon Erpenbach, who said that the group was prepared to be away for weeks, although he would prefer to end the stalemate sooner.

“That really, truly is up to the governor,” he told The Associated Press in an interview at a downtown Chicago hotel. “It’s his responsibility to bring the state together. The state is not unified. It is totally torn part.”

Meanwhile, protests at the state Capitol entered a fourth day and continued to grow — to an estimated 40,000 people, the largest crowd yet. Many schools were closed again after teachers called in sick, including the state’s largest district, in Milwaukee.

And neither protesters, Democrats or the GOP appeared ready to make any accommodations for the other side.

Demonstrators vowed to stay as long as necessary to get concessions. New Republican Gov. Scot Walker rebuffed requests to sit down with Democrats to seek a compromise.

Erpenbach (URP’-ehn-bahk) accused Walker of trying to rush the legislation, which was publicly unveiled only a week ago.

“I’m not calling him a dictator. But this is dictatorial almost,” Erpenbach said. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a draconian piece of legislation come down from any governor, Democrat or Republican.”

Republicans had warned since last year’s campaign that they would seek major concessions from unions. But for lawmakers in the minority, “The only other option we had to slow things down was to leave.”

Erpenbach said the decision to flee happened on the spur of the moment as Democrats gathered near the Capitol for a regular strategy meeting Thursday morning.

An hour later, he threw a few travel essentials — a toothbrush, razor and few changes of clothes — into a duffel bag and a backpack. He took just two or three minutes to pack, and jumped in a car for a prearranged meeting at a hotel in Rockford, Ill., just south of the Wisconsin border.

The lawmakers were concerned that police could have detained them, even though the Wisconsin Constitution prohibits the arrest of state lawmakers while the Legislature is in session, except in cases of felonies, breaches of the peace or treason.

“We knew their jurisdiction ends at the state line, and that’s why we came to Illinois,” Erpenbach said.

From Rockford, the legislators headed in different directions, most of them traveling to the Chicago area or to other parts of northern Illinois, Erpenbach said.

Since leaving Wisconsin, he said he had not spoken to any of his Republican counterparts.

The 14 Democrats planned to meet later Friday somewhere in Illinois to discuss strategy.

“We just need some time to sit down and talk, figure out where we are at and what we are hearing form our constituents, and what we’re hearing form the Republicans,” Erpenbach said.

Also Friday, the leader of the state’s largest public employee union said workers were willing to make financial concessions but not to give up bargaining rights.

Marty Beil, executive director of the Wisconsin State Employees Union, issued a statement saying the protests would continue until Walker sits down with the unions.

In a sign that the commotion might be causing other problems for the governor, he pushed back the release of his two-year budget plan by one week, to March 1.

The governor insists the concessions he is seeking from public workers — including higher health insurance and pension contributions — are necessary to deal with the state’s projected $3.6 billion budget shortfall and to avoid layoffs.

Eliminating their collective bargaining rights, except over wage increases not greater than the Consumer Price Index, is necessary in order to give the state and local governments and schools the flexibility needed to deal with upcoming cuts in state aid, Walker said.

Those arguments don’t wash with Democrats who say the fight is really about political power and quashing the unions, whose members are longtime supporters of Democrats.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald said he spoke with Democratic Minority Leader Mark Miller by phone late Thursday and asked him to bring his caucus back to Madison, but Miller refused.

By Friday morning, Fitzgerald was tired of waiting. With the governor’s approval, he asked the state patrol to go to Miller’s house in a Madison suburb.

Fitzgerald said he hoped a visit from the police would send a signal about the circumstances at the Capitol. Troopers knocked on Miller’s door and rang his doorbell, but no one answered.

The protests are growing so large that Capitol workers cannot safely move through the halls, Fitzgerald said, calling the situation “a powder keg.” The situation was expected to ratchet up on Saturday, when conservative tea party groups planned their own rallies.

Republican support for the bill remains strong, he added. “If anything, what’s going on around this building is galvanizing this caucus,” Fitzgerald said.

In Madison, some Democrats from the state Assembly went to Walker’s office to demand a meeting. Walker’s spokesman said the governor’s scheduler would get back to them.

The Assembly speaker said the chamber could vote on the bill later Friday, but it was not clear whether the GOP would attempt to proceed without Democrats, who were in a closed caucus meeting.

Minority Leader Peter Barca said he expected a “long, protracted debate” over their strategy.

Republicans hold a 57-38 majority in the Assembly, but they need 58 lawmakers present to take up the bill. That puts the lone independent, Rep. Bob Ziegelbauer, in a powerful position.

Ziegelbauer said he would show up, but hoped to convince Republican leaders to first make changes to the collective bargaining parts of the bill.

Democratic strategist Chris Lehane called the walkout in Madison the boldest action Democrats have taken since midterm elections swept Republican to power in statehouses across the country.

Walker “has been so strident that the way he’s engaged . has effectively given the Democrats the high ground in terms of how they’re responding,” Lehane said.

“What Wisconsin is going through isn’t all that different from other states,” he added. “But the way it’s being handled is.”

Here’s Brian Wilson on the NBC Nightly News covering the Capitol takeover by Wisconsinites. 

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Associated Press writers Todd Richmond, Dinesh Ramde and Jason Smathers in Madison; Michael Tarm in Chicago; and Michael Gormley in Albany, N.Y., contributed to this story.