In just a few succinct words Carl Sandburg (1878–1967) summarized the entire city of Chicago in this bit of poetical prose. By reading that you should understand the entire city in less than 60 seconds; everything that makes it the way it is, and explains the pride-of-place in the City of the Big Shoulders.
Third by population in the United States, after New York and Los Angeles, respectively, the city itself has 2.7 million residents. Chicagoland, the local name for its surrounding metropolitan area, is home to nearly 9.5 million people.
Chicago grew for a number of reasons. Most noteworthy was its location at the south end of Lake Michigan. This made it easy to traverse most of the Great Lakes, but because of the Illinois River, it also connected to the Mississippi River allowing a connection all the way down to Louisiana. It was essentially a transportation hub where lots of major trade routes met.
The climate around Chicago can be a little overwhelming if you’re not ready for it. July is its warmest month but doesn’t even hit 30° C, peaking closer to 29° C. Its coldest month is typically January, with lows in the -11° C area.
Precipitation is fairly frequent occurring every 3 to 4 days on average, even if it’s only light but, of course, that means 2/3 time it’s reasonably pleasant. And the humidity does not become overwhelming like you might find in New Orleans or Orlando.
View from a Height
If you want to look in the city skyline, have a look at this webcam from the Field Museum. The live image shows you exactly what’s going on, this day with a crystal blue sky, for example.
There is another live webcam just outside the entrance to Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs. It has a live microphone so you can hear what’s going on as well. It was pretty exciting with a massive crowd when the Chicago Blackhawks won the Stanley Cup. There are archived images available for viewing.
Of course over at abc7chicago.com you can find more than a dozen live camera views, covering a number of popular portions of the city. Or if you pop over to the University of Chicago, you can look at the ground-level view of the Science Quadrangle, the Joseph Regenstein Library/57th Street Garden Cam, or numerous others.
Being Informed
As always, weather.com provides daily reports, broken down into hourly if you need that; they also provide 5-day and 10-day predictions, notes about what to expect on the weekend, and live updates of growing systems that could pose a threat. They even have a cute little graphic showing sunrise, the highest point in the sky that the Sun reaches and sunset over the course of the day as well as the current position of the Sun.
One site named myfoxchicago provides you with particularly useful information such as Live Power Doppler Radar so that you can zoom in and see a great deal of specific detail. Another feature is their interactive radar which you can zoom out to see all the active systems in North America and even the west coast of Europe and Africa as well as a little bit of the eastern side of Asia. They even include more specific satellite images for Chicago, the Midwest, the whole region, as well as the entire nation.
They don’t stop there, but keep you informed about severe weather, school closings, traffic, and tropical weather, since they’ve been known to have twisters and suchlike, causing significant destruction.
Naturally AccuWeather has a reasonably broad array of information including the video forecast, yet another version of radar for the area, and long-range predictions of major Continental Systems that could impinge on the area. And if Forensic Weather is your thing, they have that too!
One last thing
You might experience some breezes as you walk along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago, or slightly more focused breezes between the tall buildings, but that’s not the origin of the name the Windy City. It actually references an 1876 tornado mentioned in the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper article of May 9 where it used the headline “THAT WINDY CITY: Some Freaks of the Last Chicago Tornado”.