Areas become more typically middle class but still with variety to the northwest, west, and southwest. Like many large cities, Chicago has its sprawl and growth issues, and suburbs have overtaken many older farm communities and towns like Elgin and Aurora, and there is little in the way of geography to restrain the push. Joliet is an older industrial and transportation hub on the southwest side. The rest of the area map is a patchwork quilt of suburbs, one after the other, defined by rectangular grid arteries sliced through by radii mainly along rail commuter routes emanating from the city.
The more popular suburbs typically lie towards the northwest. Some have pushed far out into old farmland, like Cary, Algonquin, Geneva and the more upscale Lake Zurich, while other quality neighborhoods lie closer in, like Elk Grove Village and Schaumberg. Good neighborhoods also lie to the south and southwest side, although contrasts are stronger between the livable and more run down areas; Hinsdale and Orland Park are more upscale picks on the southwest side.
In Chicago, location relative to major transportation routes is most important. Many endure hour-long commutes into the city and around its crowded beltways. The city has an excellent urban and suburban transportation network with an assortment of rail and bus services; nonetheless, traffic along arteries and beltways can be intense. Chicago offers numerous amenities. Museums, notably The Art Institute of Chicago, and the performing arts are top quality. Sports are legendary—whether the teams win or lose—and Wrigley Field is another of those American urban icons.
Few cities have more or better restaurants. Plus, the area has some of the best higher education in the country, and quality education is available at all levels in most neighborhoods. The lakeside location, facing into the teeth of the storm track, and continental climate from the northwest produce cold, snow, wind, storms, humid heat, and weather changes invigorating for some but intolerable for others. Cost of living varies by neighborhood and lifestyle, but is accelerating after years as a relative bargain for a big city.
The violent crime is still a problem in some neighborhoods. There are still some grubby, rundown areas that would make some people think twice. These facts hurt the statistical appraisal of Chicago. Chicago is located on a level coastal plain generally less than feet above the lake.
Most land is open and almost completely flat with occasional areas of deciduous woods. The climate is continental with frequently changing weather and is invigorating to say the least. That said, winter wind-chill factors can reach extreme proportions.
Summers can be warm and breezy to hot and humid. Lake breezes may moderate downtown temperatures 10 degrees to 15 degrees but will only occasionally extend several miles inland. Summer precipitation comes mainly from thunderstorms and can be heavy.
Winter precipitation may arrive as frontal systems from the west or heavy squalls off the lake. Fall and spring are changeable, and along with winter, can have long periods of precipitation. Half the summers have temperatures over 96 degrees, half the winters have temperatures as low as —15 degrees. First freeze is mid-October, last is late April. Recent job growth is Negative. As railroads reached into new areas, real-estate developers bought land and built towns along the lines, offering affluent Chicagoans the chance to move out of the increasingly congested central city.
Cossitt named his tract La Grange, after a Tennessee cotton farm that he had owned before the Civil War. By planting hundreds of elm trees , restricting the sale of liquor, building large singlefamily houses, setting aside property for schools and churches, contributing to the construction of a rail depot, and laying out a street plan that allowed for large lots, Cossitt wanted to distinguish his small, ordered village from what he saw as the overcrowded chaos of metropolitan Chicago.
Emphasizing the contrast between suburban and urban physical landscapes, Cossitt advertised La Grange as a utopian retreat from the perceived dangers of the city. Although La Grange's population, like that of many other railroad suburbs, represented a socioeconomic mix of upper-income professionals and lower-income service employees, many of its residents were native-born and few worked as industrial laborers.
In contrast, the large concentration of foreign-born workers in Chicago contributed further to some Americans' image of the city as a dangerous, chaotic place. The Chicago Fire of reinforced the image of La Grange and other communities in Cook County as a suburban sanctuary. By forcing refugees to seek shelter outside the city and by further convincing middle-class and wealthy Chicagoans that the city had become too dangerous, the fire accelerated the process of suburbanization and the expansion of the Chicago metropolitan area begun by the railroads, Cossitt, and other real-estate developers.
By the end of the nineteenth century, when the suburban electric railway reached La Grange, the village had been incorporated within the expanding geographic entity of metropolitan Chicago. For More Information If you have any questions or concerns which you would like to share, please contact the Village Hall at Driving Directions.
Online Resources Pay bills and view online services. Service Request Submit Online. Community Events Celebrate with Us. Emergency Alerts Sign up Online.
0コメント