Chicago S Famous Flatness Is Important And Not Always True

A Lou Mitchell’s pancake. A pool table at Chris’s Billiards. A thin-crust pizza from Vito & Nick’s. Each evokes one of Chicago’s overwhelmingly obvious physical features: flatness.

Well, we don’t need no stinking mountains! Chicagoans built their own: the skyline of the Loop, with subsidiary ranges up and down Lake Shore Drive. Every day hundreds of thousands of people in cars or on trains or bikes converge towards this man-made mountain range, as beautiful in the changing light and weather as any vista in the world.

So Chicago’s flatness is like so many other tales of this city: it’s true, except when it isn’t. And both the truth and the exceptions make the place more interesting.   v