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Hugh Hefner writes at www.chicagotribune.com – In December 1952, I stood on the Michigan Avenue bridge and tried to figure out where I had gone wrong.

A few weeks earlier I had returned to my alma mater on the Northwest Side to host an alumni revue. That night of songs, skits and laughter at Steinmetz High School reminded me of a time in my life when I believed I could accomplish anything. Now — a decade after high school, after serving in the Army during the Second World War, after completing my studies in psychology at the University of Illinois, after marriage and a dead-end job — I stood alone on the bridge. The euphoria of my high school years had long since faded. Bundled against the cold, I watched the Chicago River and wondered what had happened to those dreams, dreams that felt lost behind my uninspired career and unhappy domestic life. With tears in my eyes, I told myself I had to make a change.

Weeks later I sat at an old card table in my Hyde Park apartment and began assembling what would become Playboy. The idea for a sophisticated and sexy men’s magazine came to me some time earlier. I had already enjoyed some publishing success with That Toddlin’ Town: A Rowdy Burlesque of Chicago Manners and Morals, my cartoon sendup of the Windy City’s demimonde. I had recently left my copywriter’s job at Esquire magazine after refusing to relocate to New York City from Chicago.

Funded by $8,000 raised through hocking my furniture and borrowing from family and friends, I published Playboy’s debut issue in 1953 featuring a Marilyn Monroe photograph I purchased from a suburban calendar company. After the issue was printed, I roamed newsstands around Chicago and watched readers, delighted when I witnessed someone pick up and buy a copy.

Chicago shaped Playboy in ways I didn’t realize at the time. New York City seemed a world away from the rest of America, sophisticated and socially advanced, detached from the remainder of the country.

Chicago stood as the most significant representation of true, post-war America. The high-rises and subways brimmed with urban men who returned to the city after their experiences abroad and found themselves receptive to ideas that challenged their socially conservative surroundings. Interested in more than work and domestic security, longing for sexual adventure and enjoying the postwar financial boom, these men looked to spurn the restrictions of puritanical convention in favor of life as a single, city-bred male with a bachelor apartment and a proper martini. I counted myself among them. Playboy’s success proved I wasn’t alone.

The magazine’s success was really unprecedented, and beyond my wildest dreams. We moved into our first offices on the North Side on Superior Street across from Holy Name Cathedral. Our subsequent prosperity allowed me to indulge my fantasies at the Playboy Mansion at 1340 N. State Parkway on the magnificent Gold Coast.

We hosted the first Playboy Jazz Festival in 1959 at the Chicago Stadium to celebrate our fifth anniversary. In February 1960 we opened the first Playboy Club on Walton Street. By 1965 we had relocated to the iconic Palmolive building on Michigan Avenue and emblazoned the front with nine-foot illuminated letters spelling out Playboy. The association between Chicago and Playboy became so strong that a letter from a reader once arrived at our offices having traveled the entire U.S. postal system while addressed with only the bunny logo. By the mid-1970s, I moved to Los Angeles, the land where my dreams had come from, but Chicago remained the company’s base, headquartered in the Lake Shore Drive offices we’ve occupied since 1989.

Now, after nearly 60 years, the Playboy offices in Chicago have closed as we consolidate our operations in Los Angeles. It is bittersweet to see Playboy leave the city I love. It’s where I grew up, and where my two oldest children were born.

Chicago provided the magazine’s connection to the true American male, and in return I like to think the magazine’s presence provided the city with an edge, a reminder to the rest of America that the first steps of a sexual revolution took place at a card table at 6052 S. Harper Ave., ran wild in a State Street mansion and grew into a global presence on Michigan Avenue visible to anyone driving down Lake Shore Drive. Together we took those ideals of sexual liberation from Loop newsstands to the farthest edges of the planet. Playboy could not have happened anywhere else but Chicago.

You have my thanks.

Hugh Hefner is the founder of Playboy.