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- It is right to compare Chicago’s street network to something so obsessively exact. A recent academic study, “Urban spatial order: street network orientation, configuration, and entropy,” by Geoff Boeing, looked at the maps of 100 major world cities, and found that Chicago’s “exhibits the closest approximation of a single perfect grid.”
www.chicagomag.com/city-life/why-chicagos-grid-is-a-model-of-perfect-urban-order/
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Aug 26, 2020 · Every street has a PREFIX to tell you how it's oriented. Brennan's plan for Chicago's new numbering system effectively divided the city into quadrants, delineated by State St. (north-south) and Madison St. (east-west) -- see the red lines on the historic map below.
A measure of one implies a perfect grid, with no interruptions or curves. Chicago hits 0.89, higher than any other city on Earth. London, a city stitched together over millennia from villages on the lines of haphazardly placed Roman, medieval and Victorian thoroughfares, gets just 0.015."
When you walk around the horizontal grid today—especially in the apparently under-occupied neighborhoods to the south and west—the challenges Chicago faces might seem overwhelming. But we should remember that these situations are not natural; they do not stem from the city’s organic transformation; rather, they’re the result of ...
- Chicago’s Grid System – Introduction
- What Is A Grid System?
- How Does Chicago’s Grid System Work?
- Getting from A to B in Chicago
- Chicago’s Three Sides
- Major (and Some Minor) Streets of Chicago
There’s little I love more about Chicago than its grid system of streets. I remember taking the bus to school as a kid (the public bus, not the school bus) and listening as the stops were called out one by one, always trying to remember their order. Now, I can run off the names of all the major cross streets in the city. Okay, so maybe I’m a little...
A grid system of streets is where streets are laid out to look like a grid, with two sets of streets that run parallel to their own set and perpendicular to the other set. One famous example of a grid system is Manhattan in New York City, where avenues run perpendicular to streets: People who have spent most of their lives in cities with grid plans...
Chicago is oriented along the cardinal directions. That is, most streets run north/south or east/west. Contrast this with Manhattan, for example, which has a grid system that is angled 29 degrees. Moreover, most of Chicago’s streets are numbered by how far north, south, east, or west they sit. Streets that run north and south are numbered with east...
The upshot of this is that you can easily calculate the distance and route between two addresses, at least if you have a little help or background knowledge. Let’s say you want to get from 1060 West Addison Street… to 333 West 35th Street. Here’s what you know right off the bat (pun intended): 1. You’re at 1060 West 2. You need to go east less than...
Finally, if you’ve done your reading on Chicago, you’ll notice it’s common to divide the city into the North Side, West Side, and South Side. You can easily guess that the “North Side” might start north of Madison and the South Side south of Madison. But this isn’t really a hard and fast dividing line. Here’s an example of how somepeople might brea...
We’re going to close with a list of the major streets in Chicago, with a few minor ones thrown in. This is all for reference and easily found on any map of the city, so feel free to move onto Part 2 of the series if you’d like.
Dec 20, 2022 · A measure of one implies a perfect grid, with no interruptions or curves. Chicago hits 0.89, higher than any other city on Earth.
Chicago streets are organized in a beautiful grid pattern, but it can be quite confusing sometimes. This video runs through all the basics of Chicago's Grid ...
- 6 min
- 56.4K
- Chicago Geographer
