City guide · United States

🇺🇸Chicago

The city sits on the western shore of Lake Michigan and held 2.74 million people at the 2020 census, third-most in the United States. Its streets run on a grid grown out of the original townsite plot, so an address states how far from the centre it stands before a map does. That centre is the Loop, the central business district, and the rest is spoken of as the North, South and West Sides, or in official terms as 77 community areas. Chicago rebuilt in steel after the fire of 1871, and the tall-building work that followed is the reason most visitors spend their first hour looking up.