Early mornings on Fulton Market have a symphonic quality.

A woman pushing a stroller skirts around a dairy truck backing into a loading dock.

A bearded 20-something walking his pit bull pauses to let a forklift roll by.

Workers in long carcass-stained coats unload pallets while Google workers hunch over laptops on glass-walled balconies overhead.

As the startup scene in Silicon Valley becomes more saturated and the cost of living skyrockets, other cities are beginning to look far more attractive to startups — and to venture capitalists.

While San Francisco continues to remain supreme as the biggest and baddest of startup cities, investment research company PitchBook decided to look into other regions and cities just to be sure. Shockingly, they found the Bay Area does not have the highest percentage of profitable startups. What’s more, some of the smaller markets were far more profitable than large cities like New York City and Los Angeles. And the most profitable of all? Chicago.

In Chicago, 45 percent of investments produced 10 times a return on investment. This was far higher than the runner up, Raleigh, where 26 percent of startups produced the same return on investment. Chicago raked in high numbers across the board, with 81 percent of its startups producing between three and 10 percent a yield on initial investment. New York came in third below Chicago and Raleigh.

The Chicago Public Schools system has spent $103,000 — about the cost of a full-time teacher — in its so-far unsuccessful effort to pry more money out of Springfield, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times show.

That’s the tab to date for schools chief Forrest Claypool’s effort to lobby legislators and the governor to put more state money into the beleaguered city schools, a campaign he calls “20% for 20%.”

Since 2011, Winnebago County Board Chairman Scott Christiansen has spent nearly $800,000 from an economic development fund to pay for consultants, catering, travel expenses and subsidies to nonprofit groups without the explicit approval of the County Board.

The spending ended in April when the County Board stripped the chairman of discretionary spending authority from the county’s host fee fund, which is expected to reap $2.9 million this year from fees the county charges haulers for dumping garbage at Winnebago Landfill.

Board members curtailed Christiansen’s spending power after controversy arose regarding two consultants whom he had hired to develop a downtown vocational school for which there was little support. The Register Star obtained hundreds of public records to learn how Christiansen used his discretionary spending authority after the board gave him such power in 2011.

Dropping previous objections, Friends of the Parks now appears ready to negotiate with the city on a grand bargain that could bring the proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art to the South Side lakefront.

The decision, reached at a meeting of FOTP’s executive board late yesterday, is outlined in a memo to the group’s board members that Crain’s obtained from multiple, independent sources.

Thumbs Up: To McHenry resident Dan R. Aylward, for paying the county treasurer’s office his first installment of property taxes – all $5,734 of it – in dollar bills. Yes, it was a stunt. Yes, we feel bad for the people who had to spend the time counting that out. But we have to applaud Aylward’s spirit and message against the high property taxes in McHenry County. It certainly was a different way to protest.