This browser does not support the Video element.
Barrington native elected mayor of Boston
Michelle Wu, who grew up in Chicago and the suburbs, is the first Asian-American and first woman to be elected as the mayor of Boston.
CHICAGO - Michelle Wu is the first Asian American and first woman elected as mayor of Boston. She grew up in Chicago and the suburbs.
"Thank you for placing your trust in me to serve as the next mayor of Boston," she said.
At age 36, Mayor-elect Wu is also Boston's youngest chief executive.
"We said these things are possible. And today, the voters of Boston said all these things are possible too," Wu said.
Boston's new mayor-elect is the daughter of immigrants from Taiwan, who lived in Chicago’s South Side Bridgeport neighborhood while her father studied at the nearby Illinois Institute of Technology. They moved to the suburbs, where she graduated from Barrington High School before studying at Harvard.
After college, she commuted from Barrington to a small tea shop she started on Lincoln Avenue on the North Side of Chicago. She told Sun-Times Washington Bureau Chief Lynn Sweet it was frustrating trying to open a small business in Chicago.
"She was frustrated trying to get all the permits and inspections you need to open a small business in Chicago and then one day I guess a lightbulb hit her, and she just went to the office of then-Alderman Gene Schulter … and then all of a sudden, everything she needed — the inspections, permits — fell into place," Sweet said.
Sweet notes that Boston’s Congresswoman Ayanna Presley, a Black woman, is also a former Chicagoan who grew up in the Uptown neighborhood.