If you can't get AT&T in your building, then no independent provider was going to help you. Every independent ISP in Chicago in the 1990s was leasing last-mile from existing providers. I've had leases in commercial spaces in Chicago that didn't have AT&T wiring either, and gone over the price quotes to fix that. It's super expensive, and the subscriber dollars aren't there for people to do that work speculatively.
Verizon (or MFS, at the time) didn't stop leading last-mile to independent ISPs. Independent ISPs died because the economics weren't there for them: large consolidated providers offered the products 95% of consumers wanted at lower cost and drastically higher performance.
To me, this whole discussion about ISP competition is sort of bucketed in the same place my brain reserves for complaints about the fact that ISPs no longer offer shell accounts. Can you believe there was a time where the quality of the Unix shell you offered ISP customers was a major competitive differentiator? I'm sure there's a species of ISP customer that is really unhappy their ISP doesn't make it easy to run their own mail server, or have a freenix-competitive NNTP server, or offer any kind of shell account. But for the overwhelming majority of the market, Netflix matters more than any of those things, and AT&T and Verizon probably do a better job of delivering Netflix than any independent ISP would.