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September 2nd - 5th, 2004
26th Annual Chicago Jazz Festival
The Chicago Jazz Festival unfolds in Grant Park on the shores of Lake Michigan. From its beginnings in 1979, the festival has offered a consistently attractive blend of familiar acts and up-and-coming talent.
The park offers an inviting setting and the festival draws hundreds of thousands to picnic on the grass, making this one of the most chilled-out events in the city's annual calendar. Performances take place in the Petrillo Music Shell and on two other stages. Highlights of the programme for 2004 include Dee Dee Bridgewater and Toshiki Akiyoshi, amongst many others.
City of Chicago Website
Jazz Institute of Chicago Website
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Chicago Chicago has the lot: itinerant artists babbling Beat, Polish aunties stuffing sausage, African-American mothers organising the block, blue-collar guys bad-mouthing the Bears, a crooner singing the blues on the South Side. It's a city that wears its American heart proudly on its sleeve.
This diverse mix has built a city with an unrivalled tradition of jazz and blues, an astonishing architecture, an appetite for hearty food, award-winning newspapers, universities full of Nobel laureates and some of the most die-hard sports fans you'll ever meet.
On a cold, brutally windy day in Chicago, when the temperature's subzero and strong gusts keep you from walking down the street, the first question that will come to mind is, 'Who the hell decided to build a city and settle here?' Well, nearly three million hardy souls now call this great city home, and they can thank the mettle and vision of their Irish, Italian, German, Polish, Mexican and Asian immigrant forebears, and others who migrated here from the southern US for creating it.
Area: 230 sq km
Population: 2.9 million
Country: USA
Time Zone: GMT/UTC -6 (Central Time)
Telephone Area Code: 312 inside the Loop; 773 outside
back to top Orientation The city of Chicago, in northeastern Illinois, stretches for 25 miles (40km) along the southern tip of Lake Michigan's shore. Illinois is located in the northern central part of the United States, bordered by Wisconsin and Lake Michigan to the north, Iowa and Missouri to the west, Indiana to the east and Kentucky to the south.
The Loop is the historic center of the city, drawing its name from the elevated train tracks that circle it. Its buildings constitute a virtual textbook of American architecture. The intersection of Madison and State Streets is ground zero in a numbering system that lets you navigate without knowing any street names. From this point, all street numbers are predicated on north, south, east or west, depending on which way they radiate. Many of Chicago's neighborhoods are named for their location in relation to the Loop (South Loop, Near North, West Side, etc).
Chicago's O'Hare International Airport is 17mi (27km) northwest of downtown. Midway Airport is 12mi (19km) southwest of downtown. Amtrak's national headquarters are within Union Station, located southwest of the Loop. The Greyhound station is also southwest of the Loop, not far from Amtrak.
When to Go
July and August can get really hot in Chicago, with temperatures from 80-90°F (27-32°C) and high humidity. This is also the peak of the festival season, with major events taking place in the parks and neighborhoods every weekend. September is blessed with reliably warm days and is probably the most pleasant month of the year, weather wise, but there's less going on during this period.
January to March is when Chicago is least busy and hotels and airfares are usually at their cheapest. But it can be damp and cold - between 12°F and 29°F (-11°C and -2°C) if you're lucky - or snowy for days on end. Temperatures and brisk winds will guarantee that you'll spend most of this period indoors.
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Events
Blues and jazz musicians have been flocking to Chicago since 1915, so it's no surprise that the city knows how to celebrate its musical heritage with style. The Chicago Blues Festival is a highly regarded three-day festival held in Grant Park on the first weekend in June. Soon after, Grant Park hosts the weekend-long Chicago Gospel Festival and, on Labor Day weekend, the Chicago Jazz Festival.
Taste of Chicago is an enormous festival that closes Grant Park for 10 days leading up to Independence Day in July. Over 100 local eateries serve some of the greasiest food you've ever tried to rub off your fingers. Live music on several stages drowns out the rumble of the belches from the 3.5 million people who attend. The German-American Festival is an enjoyable Oktoberfest-type event held in the heart of an old German neighborhood at Lincoln Square during the third weekend in September.
In May, artistic types get along to Art Chicago. This massive mid-month festival on Navy Pier is a Very Big Deal in Chicago's art world. Over 3000 artists are featured, and city-wide events are held at museums and galleries. Also features the Stray Show, a separate event for up-and-coming artists.
Attractions
Art Institute of Chicago
One of the world's premier museums, the Institute has a collection that spans 5000 years of art - its impressionist and postimpressionist collection is second only to France's. Excellent maps are available free at the information booths. The bronze lions flanking the steps are Chicago icons.
back to top Chicago Cultural Center
A few blocks north of the Art Institute is the Chicago Cultural Center, which often sponsors free music concerts. Galleries, exhibitions, beautiful interior design and a permanent museum all make the cultural centre an interesting place to roam.
Chicago Historical Society
The Lincolns, Capones, Daleys and other notables are here, but the focus of this well-funded museum (located in the lower end of Lincoln Park, south of the zoo) is on the average person. The role of the commoner in the American Revolution sets the tone for the humanistic exhibits. One, titled Fort Dearborn and Frontier Chicago, shows how settlers and Indians changed each other's lives. The Pioneer Court gives hands-on demonstrations in the intricacies of making candles, weaving blankets and knitting clothes. None of the work was easy.
Much of the 2nd floor is devoted to Chicago's development and history. The roles of immigration and industry are addressed, as are the problems of slums and the lives of the rich. Special exhibitions are the museum's strong point, covering such diverse topics as how bungalows allowed almost every family to afford a home, and how WWII affected the average family.
Field Museum of Natural History
Mummies, native American artefacts, stuffed animals and dinosaurs are part of the 20 million pieces in the collections of the Field Museum of Natural History. Highlights include an ambitious walk-through exhibit that attempts to capture the scope of Africa by taking visitors from bustling city streets to expansive Saharan sand dunes; a recreated multi-level Egyptian burial chamber housing 23 mummies, and a Dinosaur Hall filled with skeletons, some of which measure their age in the tens of millions of years. The Field's most dramatic acquisition came in 1997, when it obtained a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton named Sue. Found a few years earlier by a less-than-savvy rancher who sold it for peanuts, it's the best-preserved skeleton of the fierce meat-eater yet found.
back to top Lincoln Park
Chicago's most popular neighbourhood is alive day and night with people in-line skating, walking dogs, pushing strollers and driving in circles for hours looking for a place to park. It's also home to the Biograph Theater, where gangster John Dillinger was gunned down by the FBI in 1934.
Thugs with guns have since made way for banana-packing primates. The free Lincoln Park Zoo, founded in 1868, enjoys considerable community support. Among the highlights are huge monitor lizards, Galápagos turtles, naked mole rats, fruit bats and spiders. The zoo has been a world leader in gorilla breeding, with more than three dozen born here since 1970. If you're lucky, the chimpanzees will be drawing on poster board with crayons. Some of their works have been shown in galleries.
Lincoln Park borders Lake Michigan northeast of the downtown Loop.
Magnificent Mile
This grandly named stretch of Michigan Avenue runs from the Chicago River north to Lincoln Park. 'Mag Mile,' as it's widely known, is a shopper's paradise: you can find everything from the swankiest upscale boutiques to chainstores. Its most famous landmark is the Tribune Tower, a 1925 gothic masterpiece that's home to the Pulitzer-prize winning Chicago Tribune. Eccentric owner Col Robert McCormick had his overworked reporters send rocks from famous buildings and monuments around the world and then embedded them around the base of the building. The Magnificent Mile lies northeast of the Loop.
Navy Pier
It started as a wharf, morphed into a University, and ended up as a dead 800-pound gorilla: huge, difficult to dispose of and a little on the nose. In the late 1980s the pier got a serious facelift, and is now more than half a mile of tourist-bait in the form of amusement parks, meeting centres and food courts.
Shedd Aquarium
The world's largest assortment of finned, gilled, amphibious and other aquatic creatures swim within the marble-clad confines of the Shedd Aquarium. The original 1929 building houses 200 tanks. The attached multilevel Oceanarium is a spectacular space where huge mammal pools seem to blend into the lake outside the floor-to-ceiling windows. The centrally located tank is home to 500 tropical fish from placid nurse sharks to less neighbourly moray eels. Also on hand are beluga whales, Pacific white-sided dolphins, harbour seals, sea otters and penguins.
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Wrigley Field
Seventh inning stretch and the crowd belts out a beer-soaked version of 'Take me out to the Ballgame.' There's only one place in the world you could be - Wrigley Field. Home to the Chicago Cubs, Wrigley Field draws tourists year round who pose under the classic neon sign over the main entrance to the baseball shrine.
This ivy-covered stadium, one of the oldest in America, is described by some as being as 'big as a pillbox'. It's an old fashioned ballpark, where the scoreboard is still changed by hand and where fans fought tooth and nail to prevent the stadium being kitted out with lights. If you don't have tickets, or don't want to see the Cubbies lose (as they're prone to do), stroll over to one of the streets next to the stadium, chat with the guys who hang around all day waiting for a ball to be hit out of the park or go sink a beer in one of the neighbourhood sports bar. Notice how the surrounding flats have adapted their roofs with bleachers for watching games. Players take fans on tours of the stadium several times during the season.
Wrigley Field is north of Lincoln Park. The El goes straight to the stadium, as do several bus lines.
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