our city.

Hog Butcher for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders:

-“Chicago,” Carl Sandburg

Located on the shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago was formed near a portage point between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. A crucial nexus point for trade, Chicago grew and grew within its unique, swampland environment, then endured one of the most devastating catastrophes for a city of it’s size when the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 razed the city down to it’s building posts. Despite leaving over 100,000 homeless, the fire birthed a spirit of renewal and rebuilding that has stayed with it ever since.

The Second City has since become the 3rd most populous metropolitan area in the United States, and features an amazing diversity of architecture styles with the dawn of steel-framed skyscrapers propelling the foremost architects of the 1900s to reimagine what a modern U.S. city looks like. While also carefully managing it’s linked set of green spaces – from the lakeshore parks to Lincoln Park to the string of Parisian boulevards linking the city’s neighborhoods – Chicago references it’s past while always looking to evolve and adapt itself for the future.

In being the second most visited city in the nation, it’s cultural destinations – Millennium Park, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Willis Tower, Lincoln Park Zoo, and more – are complemented by character-rich neighborhoods which create a quilt of personalities you can feel block to block as you explore the city from it’s urban core, the Loop, to the surrounding communities to the North, West, and South.

Chicago, the city, may only be outdone by it’s prideful sports teams, world-renowned restaurants, and the blues, but the ingenuity and passion originally sparked by the fire, has never left, leaving the Windy City as being perpetually on the rise to define and redefine what’s possible for an international city to be.