Getting to Know the Windy City - Chicago - page 24

the weekly magazine Time Out Chicago, which lists just about every-
thing going on around town during the week, from art openings to
theater performances.
CITY LAYOUT
The Chicago River forms a Y that divides the city into its three geo-
graphic zones: North Side, South Side, and West Side (Lake Michi-
gan is where the East Side would be). The downtown financial
district is called the Loop. The city's key shopping street is North
Michigan Avenue, also known as the Magnificent Mile. In addi-
tion to department stores and vertical malls, this stretch of property
north of the river houses many of the city's most elegant hotels.
North and south of this downtown zone, Chicago stretches along 29
miles of Lake Michigan shoreline that is, by and large, free of com-
mercial development, reserved for public use as green space and
parkland from one end of town to the other.
Today, Chicago proper has about three million inhabitants living
in an area about two-thirds the size of New York City; another five
million make the suburbs their home.
FINDING AN ADDRESS Chicago is laid out in a grid system,
with the streets neatly lined up as if on a giant piece of graph paper.
Point zero is located at the downtown intersection of State and
Madison streets. State Street divides east and west addresses, and
Madison Street divides north and south addresses. From here,
Chicago's highly predictable addressing system begins. Making use
of this grid, it's relatively easy to plot the distance in miles between
any two points in the city.
Virtually all of Chicago's principal north-south and east-west
arteries are spaced by increments of 400 in the addressing system—
regardless of the number of smaller streets nestled between them—
and each addition or subtraction of 400 numbers to an address is
equivalent to a half-mile. Thus, starting at point zero on Madison
Street and traveling north along State Street for 1 mile, you will
come to 800 N. State St., which intersects Chicago Avenue. Con-
tinue uptown for another half-mile, and you arrive at the 1200 block
of North State Street at Division Street. And so it goes, right to the
city line, with suburban Evanston located at the 7600 block north,
9 1 ⁄ 2 miles from point zero.
STREET MAPS Maps are available at the city's visitor informa-
tion centers at the Chicago Cultural Center and the Chicago