Rockford, Illinois is ninety miles from Chicago and gets described in relation to it roughly every time it is described at all. This is the fate of every mid-sized city within two hours of a large one, and Rockford wears it with the weary competence of a town that has been fine for a hundred and fifty years and expects to remain fine.
It was a machine-tool town. Furniture before that. Fasteners, hardware, the sort of manufacturing that does not photograph well but holds a country together at the joints. There are cities that made famous things and cities that made the things that made the famous things. Rockford is emphatically the second kind, and the second kind never gets the shirt.
The river and the rest
The Rock River runs through it, which is where the name comes from, which is the most straightforward etymology in the Midwest. There are gardens — an actual, formally excellent Japanese garden that people travel for and then describe, invariably, as "surprising for Rockford". Everything is surprising for Rockford. That is the whole problem with how Rockford gets talked about.
A hundred and forty thousand people live there. They have opinions about where to eat and they are correct. The winters are real winters and nobody makes a performance of it.
We printed it because "surprisingly good, consistently overlooked" is not a flaw in a town, it is a description of most towns, and the ones that fit it best are exactly the ones the souvenir industry decided to skip. Rockford has a river and a garden and a century of making the parts. Ours is a shirt that takes that entirely seriously.
— the management