Mr. Obama is to appear here on Thursday to announce that the Pullman district, once a planned factory town and a cradle of the labor movement for African-Americans, will become a national monument. The timing has infuriated some of Mr. Emanuel’s opponents, who steam that this is one more political nudge, five days before the election. Mr. Emanuel is scheduled to attend.

Mr. Emanuel’s supporters say the mayor’s appointed school board closed schools that had too few students and were failing to educate them. And while the number of homicides increased to 504 in 2012 even as other major cities saw drops, crimes and killings have decreased here significantly compared with two decades ago. While shootings increased 12 percent last year from a year earlier, city officials reported 407 homicides in 2014, the fewest in more than 40 years.

In an interview, Mr. Emanuel addressed the notion of two Chicagos. “ ‘The city that works’ has to work for everybody,” he said, alluding to a nickname for Chicago. “Have we made progress in areas that had developed for years? Yes. Is our work done? Absolutely not.”

Mr. Emanuel said the decision to close so many schools had been extremely difficult. “But I did not want to be the mayor who says kids should have a better school and relegate them to underenrolled, underperforming schools because it was easier for me and harder for them the rest of their lives,” he said.

He pointed to other choices that he said had helped the city — and its most struggling neighborhoods. “We also did full-day kindergarten, we did pre-K universal, we turned the community colleges into a career and a job builder rather than a repeat of your high school years, which is why we doubled enrollment,” he said.

For a city accustomed for the better part of a half-century to having someone named Daley at its helm, Mr. Emanuel, 55, has made himself at home with uncanny speed and apparent ease. After winning a legal fight over whether he had lived in Chicago long enough to run for mayor, Mr. Emanuel captured more than 55 percent of the vote in 2011, sidestepping a runoff.

Mr. Emanuel’s immediate predecessor, Richard M. Daley, the city’s longest-serving mayor, was dubbed “mayor for life,” but Chicagoans have seemed to adapt quickly, perhaps because Mr. Emanuel’s style — pugnacious, brusque and eternally certain — matched what the city was used to. And while people once noted that many of the city’s 50 aldermen marched in lock step with the Daleys — first Richard J., the father, and, after a 13-year interlude, Richard M., the son — Mr. Emanuel has managed to build what one political scientist called “an even larger rubber stamp than any Daley.”