29 April 2024

Chicago

We offer a wide choice of cheap flights to Chicago together with Chicago hotels, tours and self-drive itineraries.

Other USA Reviews

Blown away by the Windy City

Frank Sinatra waxed lyrical about it, Al Capone terrorised it... and Tom Bower simply fell in love with Chicago.

Chicago - The Buckingham Fountain at night

1 The Buckingham Fountain at night 2 Wrigley Building 3 Enjoy the jazz

LOUIS AND LEFTY'S introduction to Chicago was hilarious. With the Godfather theme playing gently in the background, their ‘Gangland Tours’ bus ride of the city’s Al Capone landmarks was two hours of jokes, blood and gore.

The infamous ‘handshake murder’ story told at the site of the Valentine Day’s massacre was memorable. ‘A smile takes you a long way,’ Alphonsus had smirked to his henchmen, ‘but a smile with a gun takes you a lot further.’

Chicago has changed dramatically since the end of Prohibition and Capone’s incarceration for tax fraud. Apart from a bullet hole in a church’s masonry, the only building left associated with Capone’s rackets is the Green Mill, a great jazz bar, opened in 1907, which the mobster frequented.

‘Is Al coming tonight?’ I asked the bar’s owner. ‘Said he’ll be in later,’ he shot back unhesitatingly. ‘Have a few martinis while you wait.’ Bleary-eyed at 3am, I staggered to a taxi.

The following morning, I could recall a night of music and laughter in a mellow atmosphere where even the great Louis Armstrong had played.

A vibrant metropolis

At the end of my first day, Chicago had revealed itself to me as a vibrant metropolis with out- standing clubs, restaurants , shops, galleries and an arts scene to compete with New York’s.

As a bonus, there are good beaches along Lake Michigan, friendly people and a compelling story of a city rising from the ashes of a devastating fire in 1871.

Maureen De Matoff, originally from London, is one of the voluntary ‘greeters’ who introduce visitors to the city’s beauty. Our threehour walk through the downtown area was the first revelation.

Skyscrapers were invented in Chicago in 1885 and it enjoys the best of modern architecture. Original design have flourished ever since Daniel Burnham’s pio-neering constructions for the 1893 World’s Fair.

It was the boast of city barons as they vied to host the 400th anniversary celebrations of Columbus’s landing in America that attracted the nickname Windy City, not the weather.

Elisha Otis invented the first safe lift in the city, just as George Ferris produced the first giant wheel, forerunner of the London Eye.

Top architects have been attracted to produce the most beautiful and highest edifices. Public funding has filled their buildings with art by Chagall, Henry Moore, Miro and Picasso.

Art Deco designs grace The Rookery, one of the city’s earliest skyscrapers, and the Marquette Building is adorned by striking Tiffany glass. I took a train to Oak Park, a suburb where Frank Lloyd Wright, lived and worked 100 years ago.

His eventful life included several marriages, adultery and the murder of his mistress and her children by a servant, but the still managed to design 400 houses, all different and all provoking demoralising comparisons with British homes.

The compelling guided tour of Wright’s house and a short walk to see the exteriors of about 20 of his other houses inspired me to radically rethink the design of my own home.

That’s Chicago’s unexpected magic: it’s provocative. Back in the city, I passed the eccentric Wrigley Building, and crossed the river to the new Millennium Park.

Nowhere boasts an outdoor auditorium like Frank Gehry’s staggering halfsunken 1,500-seat venue in the park, financed by private donations. I sat in comfort by the lake in the middle of a botanical garden, listening for free to the perfect acoustics of a great orchestral performance of Franz Liszt.

harmony among the races

That evening, I took my jazzloving teenage son to Andy’s, a barrestaurant with live music that allows entry to under-18s. The steaks were big, the jazz was cool and the atmosphere relaxed. Later, I headed alone for Blue Chicago, another of the dozens of bars offering live music for less than £5.

Intimacy is the beauty of Chicago’s bar scene. In smallish rooms, the musicians’ performances are personal, calm and yet professional. Eager for one more taste, I headed out in the early hours to hear the blues at Green Dolphin Street Restaurant.

The casual access to live music surrounded by amiable aficionados at a simple bar is pure pleasure. Next day I headed for the Museum of Science and Industry.

Don’t yawn! I defy anyone not to be awed by a real German U-boat, captured during the Second World War and housed in a vast 150-yard long hangar.

Some say you should allow two days to see the museum but five hours is enough to go inside the U-boat, ‘descend’ into a coal mine, enjoy a simulated ride into space and see the exhibit of the human body – a real man and woman who died in the Forties and were sliced into tiny sections and preserved in glass slides for us to understand our bodies.

Chicago’s gem, the Art Institute, was next up. After Paris, Chicago boasts the best collection of Impressionists, with Van Goghs, Lautrecs and Monets which have never been seen in Europe.

Unmissable in the Institute’s American collection, especially after nights spent in the city’s music bars, is Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks – an eerie image of loneliness in the big city.

The northern district of Lincoln Park was celebrating a two-day street festival – Chicago has huge free shows in its parks throughout spring and summer.

Taste Of Lincoln Avenue is an extravaganza of food, drink and music. Thousands were having great fun, drinking beer, eating a huge selection of ethnic foods and listening from different vantage points to live rock, blues, jazz and heavy metal.

I could not resist a hot Polish sausage served by a Polish family, part of the huge immigrant community in Chicago, while listening to Blue Oyster Cult, a bizarre but popular group.

Here, surrounded by smiling faces, Chicago’s virtues and vices became apparent. The friendly audience was entirely of European descent, yet the city is predominantly black. There are no visible tensions but Chicago, like most cities in the world, is divided.

Forty years ago, the differences sparked riots. The city’s success has been to create harmony among the races, albeit while they remain in their separate communities.

My kind of town

I wondered whether to tour the Italian, Lithuanian, Swedish, Korean and Mexican neighbourhoods but resisted. All the ethnic foods are available in the central area around ‘the Loop’, named after the aboveground train.

Chasing food by taxi seemed wasteful. The choice that evening was either pizza – Chicago boasts the world’s best deep-dish pizzas, blessed with masses of different toppings – or baseball at ESPN Zone. We chose ESPN, a brash, loud grill with huge screens simultaneously showing different baseball games.

Teenagers and old men love the excitement, and occasionally are spotted sloping off to ski, race cars and shoot on the nearby virtualreality arcade machines.

Breakfast the next morning was at Tempo, a terrific diner in the Gold Coast district, where the restaurants are among the best. They include Graham Bowles’s excellent food at the Peninsula, Morton’s, the city’s most famous steakhouse, Charlie Trotter’s, among the best of the ‘nouvelle’ eateries, and Coco Pazzo, for good Italian food at reasonable prices. The following day found us on the beach at 57th Street.

On the sand, so close to the city centre, I could not resist reading an account of Chicago’s gang wars. The folklore about gangsters called ‘Deanie, Hymie, Bugs, Big Jim’ and, of course, ‘Scarface’ Capone is as much a part of Chicago’s history as the heritage left by the architects and tycoons. Politicians such as ‘Hinky Dink’ Kenna and ‘Bathhouse’ Coughlin urged The Untouchables to hunt down the Mob.

‘Chicago,’ they declared in the Twenties, ‘ain’t no sissy town.’ Eighty years later, that remains solidly true. Echoing Frank Sinatra’s memorable song, Chicago is my kind of town.

0330·100·2220i 0330 calls are included within inclusive minutes package on mobiles, otherwise standard rates apply. X 0330 calls are included within inclusive minutes package on mobiles, otherwise standard rates apply. X