Chicago is a city that is walkable.

Grant Park (1901-1911) waterfront on Lake Michigan and the Wrigley Building (1920).

Despite the size of the urban footprint, the scale of the city of Chicago is such that people may walk easily from the Loop to State Street or Michigan avenue, or from Lincoln to Grant Parks, while towering buildings fill the private spaces among all these public destinations.

A place that is as very vertical as it is spread out horizontally on to the adjacent prairie from the lakeshore.

Once the Chicago River was so polluted with manufacturing and municipal waste that the Chicago River was redirected to flow, not into but, away from Lake Michigan. The canal that redirected the river's current dumped the foul water into the Illinois River under the mistaken belief that the river would purify the water pollution by the time it reached the Mississippi River.

The Chicago River today.