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Time Out Chicago / Sep 12, 2007

Essential Chicgao

By TOC staff
Illustration by Andy Potts

There’s great stuff everywhere you turn in our city: the architecture, the people, the food, the lake-—the sublimely obscene insults hurled at us when we’re waiting for our cheese fries at the Wiener’s Circle. To help quantify just how cool Chicago is, we’ve put together a list—or rather, a bunch of lists—of good, bad and just plain weird things that we love about the city, along with some statistics that tell who we are and how we’ve changed through the years. New in town? Get your facts straight with 10 pages of obsessive observations no local know-it-all should be without.

	Essential people: A sampling of the almost 3 million folks that we – proudly or reluctantly - claim as our own.
	Essential places: Some of these locales won't show up on any official guided tour, but they're all a part of where we call home.
	Essential things: From the four-star flag to great live music, this is the stuff that could only come from Chicago.

Next: Essential people

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