Welcome to the
world of Chicagoland! Chicago, with its downtown, neighborhoods, suburbs, and surrounding cities, is a world unto itself. Its city center gleams into the night as one of the great skylines of the globe. Its parklands adorn its busy corridors like emeralds in a silver crown. Its sandy lakeshore beaches and lush forest preserves glisten in the summer, shimmer in the autumn, dance in the winter winds. History and genius meet generously in Chicago's architectural landmarks, its superb museums, its institutions of higher learning. People of every ethnicity, creed, and vocation bustle in the whirl of the commercial Loop, then relax and enjoy tranquil moments among the constellations of graceful residential homes. The finest artists, musicians, performers and writers are drawn in multitudes to the electricity of the metropolis; many of the world's great chefs, designers, professionals and entrepreneurs also make their home within its glass canyons and vintage mansions. What kind of place has a magnetism that has been calling settlers and visitors from far and wide across the broad prairie that surrounds it for almost two hundred years? Why do pilgrims native to balmy coastal climes resettle to brave our wild and deep seasons? In the quietest places of Chicagoland, in the stillest nights and snowiest days, the answer speaks to one who listens for it. The trees rustle as though to whisper the ancient words of Illinois' first peoples, and the lap of the lake recalls the inexorable progress of glaciers. Spirits of the earth and the sky move through your breath and lull you along the nighttime flicker of superhighways, into the glorious daylight of a clear vernal dawn, up the elevators of a tower reaching into the elation of the atmosphere, until all the world unfolds before you and, even if only for a moment, you have found the far dimensions of your perception. What else might you find here?
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