Right, so I was in Chicago for a week on vacation. For various reasons, I had no particular expectations of the city, but I've lived in Southern California my whole life. Just to give context to what I find "normal."
My first impressions of Chicago had me comparing it to European cities. I think there were two reasons for it. The first is that we were staying in an older part of the city, where there was a mix of old and new style buildings on every block. And the old buildings had that Old World feel waaaaay more than where I live. Chicago is built for its weather and natural disasters. And wow are those different than what I'm used to.
And the other thing was how walkable it was. (And also how impossible it seemed to be to find parking. OMG, I thought DTLA was bad. HOW WAS IT WORSE???)
So what did I notice that made it walkable? First, zoning clearly worked very differently. I'm used to large chunks of city being residential or commercial, and not mixed up. So having all these buildings that were commercial on the first floor and then residential? WONDERFUL. Also just having the buildings being all mixed together. A few times we ended up on a block that was all residential, but the literal next street over had lots of businesses we could see from the cross streets.
The other thing that made it walkable was the shade. Since nearly everywhere was made with tall buildings and narrower streets, there was just so much more shade and regular nice breezes. I've been told that this sucks in the winter. But, oh it was lovely in the summer.
Oh yah, and also the sidewalks were wider than I'm generally used to. And it was pretty easy to find water fountains in the parts of the city we were in. Bathrooms, too. (I literally do not know if I was ever in any "bad" parts of town in our wandering. SoCal has lots of bad parts of town that are perfectly lovely when the sun is up. We were mostly only out with the sun up, since it was setting at like 8:30 at night.)
What could have made it more walkable? Well, more benches would have been nice? By the end of the trip, my blisters had blisters. I would have def taken more breaks if I could have. So it was walkable for able-bodied people, at least.
And also, I never quite figured out the local etiquette for crossing the street. Like, I'm sorry, but I do fear death? Our second day there, we literally heard a woman explaining to her small child, "We don't worry about what the signal says. We just cross if it's clear. We aren't tourists [derogatory]." And cars were far less likely to wait for pedestrians, too. Like, I may actually look up the driving laws for Illinois, because that was jarringly different.
My thoughts on public transit and everything else are gonna be a whole different post, since this has gotten long enough.
