Chicago Errata

I never took the time to mention anything about my Chicago trip from a couple weeks ago, so now here are some bits of impression:
1. Chicago is a very segregated city. I mean, very segregated. I was looking at a website while there that had demographic info on each of the many neighborhoods (Chicago prides itself on being a "city of neighborhoods," if you didn't know. Presumably that's to make it seem more friendly). I can't remember which, but one had a Hispanic concentration of 97%. That's 97, not 9.7. I made the joke to a couple people that NYC doesn't even have single apartment buildings with that high a concentration of any one race or ethnicity. It's pretty ridiculous, but evidently that's how it works. I guess there are some benefits to having an relatively exclusive community to yourself if you belong to a minority, but that can't be good in the larger sense.
2. The is a punk club located in an oddly barren spot along North Ave that's called Exit Chicago. On its marquee it offers two proclamations: "Chicago's first punk club," and "since 1983." That's cute, Chicago. Really, 1983?
3. Another bit of date oddness: I went to a basement bar/seafood restaurant (that was pretty cool and good food actually) that claimed on its outside sign to have been open "since 1969," while the sign inside claimed its founding at 1968. This wouldn't be as odd, but the two signs are literally not more than 5 three-dimensional feet away from each other.
4. Location isn't terribly important when it comes to the cost of renting apartments. You would pay close to the same cost for a decent 2-bedroom in a far northern neighborhood as you would for an identical place in the more conveniently located and hipper Lincoln Park. Obviously this is a gross simplification of things a realtor told me, but taken in context to my six-year residence of NYC, it's pretty jarring information.
5. Chicago is on a grid system too. Now, truly--forgive me for even suggesting this, but--their grid is probably even smarter than ours. It's not simply based on numbered blocks, but actual measured blocks. As opposed to having a bar located at 86th St and 2nd Ave, you'd have a bar located at 2400 North Clark and 800 West Diversey (that address is not necessarily perfect, I'm just making it up from memory, though it's probably not off by a huge amount). All you need to know is that the N/S/E/W quadrants zero downtown, and that it's a half-mile for every 400. So really all you need is the address and you're there. It's just a full mathematical graph, whereas NYC's is more of a single-quadrant graph. I don't know, maybe I'm overreacting to something new. It's increibly intuitive though, and that's right up my alley.
6. The El is a horrible idea, and it's the great stubborn fault of the city itself that they've never put it underground. It's dirty, it's loud, it's exposed to their horrible winter, and it's slow. How the El ever came to be some romantic image of Chicago is beyond me. Wake the fuck up, people.
7. This says more about me living in NYC than anything else, but there is a lot of light in Chicago. You don't get the constantly-shaded canyon effect there. At 3:00PM on a sunny day, you can walk down the sidewalk and be bathed in sun. There are definite benefits to not having many buildings taller than 4 stories, and not as densely packed.
8. If anyone ever wanted to know where Chicago sits on the continuum of American cities, there were far far more areas there that reminded me of Columbus than New York. This is slightly unfair, as NY is unique, but it's also true. While Chicago is certainly large and definitely has the feel of a city some magnitude larger than Columbus, it feels to me even more than that smaller than NY. Maybe "smaller" is not the best descriptor. It's residential. It's downtown stacks up nicely with anyplace, but it goes almost immediately from there to endless blocks of houses and townhomes and small apartment buildings.