Overall
Chicago is a neat place. Downtown is super impressive. It stretches out in every direction and puts all sort of different interesting architecture right next to each other. There’s no end of things to see or spaces to explore. It’s beautiful in the spring. I’ve experienced mostly sunny days in the 60s and 70s.
The train covers a lot of the city. It’s very old and the ride is rickety. It is not affected by traffic, which is great. The apparently do a lot of their maintenance and construction on it over the weekend. This caused my ride from the airport to Ukrainian Village to be interrupted by a shuttle ride between two stations to skip the section that was being worked on. That was a real pain. I avoided that stretch over the weekend and ended up taking a car share back to the airport when I left.
Bus service is reliable and easy to find, although it’s not as frequent as I would like — similar to Seattle, I’d say, based on my limited experience. It seems to be much more reliable than Seattle though. The bus seemed to always arrive when my app said it would.
There are so many different neighborhoods that would be livable. Most neighborhoods have a street or two of mixed use buildings which results in rows of shops that reflect the character of the neighborhood. Andersonville was a standout. I really felt good there. I saw more masked people there than I have anywhere in recent memory aside from an airport.
Cars are everywhere in Chicago. Even tiny residential streets might have loads of traffic, and most neighborhoods have a street or two that are wider and have few stops which leads to what are essentially highways running through neighborhoods. These streets tend to have businesses off the streets behind parking lots which contrasts with the typical in-neighborhood commercial setup of buildings at the streets. These streets are plentiful and uncomfortable to be on as a pedestrian.
Neither of the apartments I stayed in were very well noise isolated, and I wonder if this is a function of the time they were built and the fact they were probably intended as single-family homes. I could hear people moving around above me as if they were trying to be heard. It sounded like everyone either weighed 800 pounds or were stomping as hard as they could in an attempt to be heard. This led me to waking up on someone else’s schedule on several occasions, including at 4:30am on the morning of my departure from the city.
People have been very nice except for the shuttle driver that bridged the train construction for us. He was rude to a passenger. I haven’t experience anyone else being rude while I was here, except for a car that blew a horn at me while I was crossing an in-signaled crosswalk. Actually, people do seem to like using their horns. I’ve heard several instances of it.
Ukrainian Village
This neighborhood is sleepy and slow, although it does have a nice commercial area. There’s nothing particularly interesting to me, but they have a nice grocery store and some really good restaurants. It’s a short walk from Wicker Park which has a much more extensive and “cooler” commercial street. Here you can find pretty much whatever you want including a number of thrift stores. There’s a book store here I would have liked to see, but I never got to.
The train was somewhat far from the area I stayed in, but it was still accessible. Bus service is easier to come by.
This area was nice and quiet to stay in, but I’m not sure I’d want to live here.
Lincoln Park
Lincoln Park is a bit more lively than Ukrainian Village, although I ended up staying in the worst part of it possible. I’m on the west side of Lincoln Park, directly on one of the most unpleasant streets I’ve experienced in the city. Getting off that street, you’ll find some of the most picturesque residential streets in the city. The restaurants in this immediate area are mostly geared toward students at DePaul and don’t interest me much.
Moving over to the east side of the neighborhood, things get much more pleasant. You don’t have the car-infested streets like the one I’m on here. You also have a few really cool commercial areas, although they are a little bit stuffy for my taste. They have wonderful parks, and if you go all the way east, you get to the Lincoln Park Zoo which is a beautiful and free zoo!
I could see living in the parts of Lincoln Park that are closer to the city, but it doesn’t seem like a perfect fit.