From its flatness to midwestern niceness, let us count the ways.
on June 22, 2017
showing 1 to 30 of 32
Best of Chicago 2016
on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
From the Chicago accent to the Grid, let us count the ways.
Edward Brennan’s system of street naming and numbering makes the city’s present and past comprehensible.
by Bill Savage on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
The Grid is Chicago's circulatory system: the residential and commercial streets, secondary arterials, grand boulevards, and teeming expressways, the gangways and alleys. It is the system of street naming and numbering that makes Chicago comprehensible and easily navigated.
Deathless memories of Jordan’s team help us cope with Chicago basketball’s dysfunctional present.
by Ben Joravsky on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
I was sitting in a bar in Los Angeles last year, watching the NBA finals, and the bartender said to me: "So you're a Bulls fan, eh?" "How did you know?"
The time zone is steady, reasonable, and forgiving—not unlike Chicagoans.
by Jude Stewart on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Relocating to Chicago from Connecticut five years ago gave me pause. My unease had less to do with the city than its time zone.
The Cubs are the team to watch this year, but the upper deck at U.S. Cellular Field remains the best place to see a game.
by Kate Schmidt on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
It wasn't just the elotes or the enticing smell of fried peppers and onions that got me. It was the diverse crowd of fans wholly intent on the ballgame. It was the summer of 2000 and I'd just moved to Chicago.
Da dialect of da Daleys is becoming increasingly rare.
by Edward McClelland on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
In the parking lot of a grocery store in Beverly, I heard the most Chicago sentence ever spoken. "Yeah," said a middle-aged man who could only have spent his entire life in the city's most Irish neighborhood, "dey're buildin' a new Cat'lick church out dere in Orland Park."
A visit to this longstanding cultural hub is the perfect antidote to overstimulation.
by Brianna Wellen on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Walking down the stretch of North Milwaukee between Diversey and Fullerton is enough to give you whiplash. To your left, there's a farmers' market; to your right, a movie theater; to your left, an arcade; to your right, a giant mural; to your left and your right and your left and your right again, a craft cocktail bar—I'm getting dizzy just thinking about it.
The city’s crosstown streets follow their own rules.
by Daniel Kay Hertz on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
There were supposed to be more of them. It was in the Plan.
This 58.6-mile forest-preserve trail gives urban cyclists a much-needed taste of the wilderness.
by Robin Amer on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Chicago has manicured parks and an expansive lakefront, but where does one wander if one wants to get lost in the woods? The options are slim for everyone, but the problem is particularly acute for long-distance cyclists, who ride for miles through the grittiest and most dismal parts of the collar counties to get anywhere vaguely green and remote (or anywhere with hills, for that matter).
Drinking before inking isn’t always a party foul.
by Sarah Nardi on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
In college my roommates and I would congregate around the breakfast table, well north of noon, to take inventory of our various UPIs. Not to be confused with UTIs, unidentified party injuries are the bumps and bruises sustained during the previous night's bacchanalia.
All the entertainment and insight you need is on an el platform, surrounded by automobile traffic.
by J.R. Jones on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
For more than a decade I rode the Red and Brown Lines to work, peering down at cars and pedestrians as my train groaned into the Loop. So when I moved recently to Avondale, along the Blue Line, I was startled and strangely excited to be waiting for my train on a platform smack in the middle of the Kennedy Expressway.
It’s a delight to watch the slow-dawning revelation that another American city might give NYC a run for its money.
by Rebecca Makkai on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
I'm often in the position of introducing Chicago to New Yorkers who've never before spent time here. Writer friends land on a book tour; old college pals pass through for family weddings; publishing colleagues come by on business.
Public written language speaks to the character and composition of neighborhoods and communities.
by Darryl Holliday on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
There is an actual "Chicago" typeface—that sans-serif abomination designed for Apple computers in 1984. Remember your first-gen iPod?
Sometimes what people write on walls is nastier than it is funny, but it can tell you a lot about the culture and history of a neighborhood.
by Leor Galil on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
You can tell a lot about a place of business by its bathroom. Are the facilities pleasantly lit, or are they so dim you can barely see the outline of your own body parts?
The city’s 1,900 miles of backstreets make Chicago the “Alley Capital of America.”
by Ryan Smith on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
There's no alley equivalent of the Magnificent Mile. The 1,900 miles of backstreets that crisscross Chicago's Grid—more than in any other municipality in the U.S.—are only beautiful for their utility.
Come for the comfortable chairs, stay for the people-watching.
by Aimee Levitt on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
The first time I hung out at the Palmer House, it was prom night. A couple of friends were in from out of town for a conference and were staying there, so it felt OK to take up a few chairs in the lobby.
The male strip club in Boystown is an acquired taste—but there’s no reason to feel ashamed about it.
by Jason A. Heidemann on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
When it comes to gay nightlife in Chicago, the Lucky Horseshoe occupies a category all its own. Known to regulars as "the ’Shoe," the Boystown joint at the corner of Halsted and Belmont is the city's only bar featuring a daily lineup of male dancers.
The Chicago Magic Lounge in Uptown aims to be a clubhouse for the sleight-of-hand artists keeping the craft alive.
by Kevin Warwick on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Until I found a comb-bound catalog of "Tricks gathered from the four corners of the World" in a second-hand store in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 2014, I didn't have much clue about the history of Chicago magic—much less know that the city had pioneered its own style. Printed in 1940 by the National Magic Company (once located downtown in the Palmer House), the tattered volume features whimsical, colorful illustrations of vintage tricks on its cover (a rabbit out of a box, Chinese linking rings, et cetera).
The park no longer is a symbol of bigotry, but it isn’t a success story either.
by Steve Bogira on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
For decades, southwest-side Marquette Park was a national symbol of racial bigotry. It's no longer that today, but neither is it an emblem of togetherness.
The 1960s-era souvenir machines are about dwelling in the perpetual rather than the past.
by Wendy McClure on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
You don't go looking for a Mold-A-Rama. That's not how it works.
The curving streets of the affluent north suburbs are lined with midcentury-modern marvels and the locations of John Hughes movies.
by Laura Pearson on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Ask a child to name the most annoying things adults do for fun, and "drive around looking at houses" might top the list. When I was growing up, my parents would, without warning, take a meandering route home from the mall, church, or Sam's Club to gawk at real estate on unfamiliar streets in previously unexplored neighborhoods of southwest Michigan.
Or at least they do for one weekend.
My mother is a nosy woman, especially about houses. She likes to peer into windows.
An amateur pianist finds peace and quiet inside the practice spaces of Chicago’s central library.
by Jake Malooley on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Inside a snug, spartan room at the Harold Washington Library Center, Shimon Marcucci had fine-tuned what probably amounted to several albums' worth of music before I'd ever played a note there. For four years, the middle-aged bureaucrat turned amateur composer had spent his lunch break on the eighth floor of Chicago's mammoth central library, soprano saxophone in tow.
In the magic threshold between night and day, the city is a diorama subject to study.
by Ben Austen on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
The summer after high school, I delivered bagels in the mornings, leaving the south side for work at 4:30 AM, when the entire city remained idled in sleep. Except maybe for Santiago, who'd been boiling and baking the bagels since midnight.
There are some reasons to love—or at least respect—the universally reviled pest.
by Mike Sula on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Earlier this year, I was waiting for a bus in front of a gas station in Albany Park when I noticed an elderly woman milling around in the decorative ground cover that passes for green space in the parking lot. She was tossing fistfuls of torn bread onto what I then noticed was a cratered moonscape of holes in the ground.
Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name (or at least your face).
by Tony Adler on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
We no longer have a mayor at my local coffeehouse. There used to be a guy—a genial Hal Holbrook type—who filled that unofficial position.
Logan Square is gentrifying fast, but everybody’s still welcome at the Freeze.
A few years ago I was walking past Tastee-Freez, a fast-food joint on Armitage near California, when I saw workers boarding up the shacklike shop's windows. I couldn't help myself—I shouted "No!," almost like Darth Vader at the end of Revenge of the Sith.
If Governor Rauner has his way, Helmut Jahn’s remarkable creation will be a thing of the past.
by Deanna Isaacs on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a great little poem for the official opening of what was then called the State of Illinois Building, on May 6, 1985. It was part of her job; as the state's poet laureate, she'd been asked to produce something in honor of the occasion.
Close quarters, minuscule budgets, and structural limitations can work wonders when it comes to creating intimacy and forcing invention.
by Zac Thompson on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
If it's true that wisdom comes from suffering, then Chicago theatergoers must have some of the wisest butts on earth. I'm not talking about devotees of the big commercial theaters in the Loop, where the seats boast such hedonistic excesses as back support and stuffing.
If it didn’t have commercials it would also be better than most satellite stations.
by Tal Rosenberg on June 23, 2016 at 4:00AM
When I was a child, I listened to childish things. I put a B96 bumper sticker on my mom's car in grade school, I was glued to Loveline and Q101 all through middle school, and I studied classic-rock radio with naive devotion in high school.
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