5 Fantastic Reasons to Fall for Chicago

The Windy City. Chi-Town. The City of Big Shoulders. Whatever you call it, Chicago packs an enormous amount of city into a walkable, lakefront package. Third largest in the country, and arguably the most underrated. Here are five reasons it deserves a spot on your list, and maybe on your wall.

1. Twenty-six miles of lakefront

Most people picture skyscrapers when they think of Chicago, and then they arrive to find twenty-six miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, complete with beaches, a continuous trail, and harbors full of sailboats. It is a genuine coastal city that happens to sit in the Midwest, which is exactly why a nautical chart of its waters makes so much sense.

2. The architecture is the museum

Chicago basically invented the skyscraper, and the whole downtown reads like an outdoor gallery of it. Take the architecture boat tour up the river at least once. Craning your neck at a hundred years of design from the water is the best ten dollars in the city.

3. A river that runs backwards

In one of the great feats of stubborn engineering, the city reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900 so it would carry away from the lake instead of into it. It still runs backwards today, and yes, they dye it green every St. Patrick's Day.

4. The food does not miss

Deep-dish gets the headlines, but the real story is the range: Italian beef, Maxwell Street Polish, tasting menus that trade blows with any city in the world, and a taqueria on nearly every corner worth stopping for. Come hungry and stay a while.

5. Neighborhoods with their own gravity

Chicago is really a collection of neighborhoods stitched together, each with its own accent and its own reason to visit, from the galleries of the West Loop to the beaches of Rogers Park. You could spend a week and only scratch the surface.

If Chicago is your city, or the place you keep coming back to, a Chicago wood chart puts that shoreline and those harbors on your wall in carved birch. Or explore the rest of the Great Lakes charts to find your own patch of freshwater.