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I was born in a Chicago winter during a cold snap so brutal that the nurses wouldn’t allow my mother to leave the hospital for days and days; my grand-mother, visiting from a slightly warmer city, wept that my parents had brought a child into such a viciously cold world. Chicago summers are saturated and bright—the beaches are packed with sunbathers and surfers; the tree-lined avenues and grassy parks exhale their humid, green air throughout the city. But Chicago wears winter like a heavy coat: The snow blows deep, the chill lingers, darkness falls early, and the icy wind blowing in off Lake Michigan can give the air a bone-cracking feeling. But spend any time in the city during that dark, dense season and you’ll see that winter may in fact be when the city is at its warmest: a burst of heat and conversation spilling out onto the sidewalk when a restaurant door opens to let in another party; the twinkling glow of hotel lobbies and store windows decked out for Christmas; the tidal flow of down-swaddled bodies riding the bus and the el and the Metra, forging communal pathways through the snow and slush.
Chicago is a city that knows itself intimately and knows what to do about it: It’s winter, and it’s cold and dark, so it’s time to bring in the light. When you grow up in Chicago, you see all its magic as perfectly normal: school trips to grand institutions like the Art Institute or the Museum of Science and Industry; a friend whose friend has a little sailboat and takes you out on the lake to watch Independence Day fireworks from directly underneath them; a Saturday afternoon cheering the outfielders from the bleachers at Wrigley Field.
Whenever I go home—no matter how long I live elsewhere, Chicago will always be home—the entire city washes over me the moment I step off the plane. You can’t eat anywhere the way you can eat in Chicago: the Greek chicken at the Athenian Room, the aquarium-smoked rib tips at Honey 1 BBQ, the weird materials-science artistry of Alinea, the cheese-spackled deep-dish pie at Pequod’s. (“It’s a casserole!” sneer the critics. To which I reply: What’s wrong with a casserole?) I think it took leaving Chicago for me to truly love it, to really understand its grit and beauty: Chicago has its own rhythms and moods, its own hierarchies and customs. Its character was molded by the stockyards, by the river, by the Great Migration, by Frank Lloyd Wright, by the blues, by the Bulls, by the recently repopularized Italian beef sandwiches.
It is the intersection of the endlessly horizontal prairie and the infinitely upward-reaching skyline. There is no city like this city, no place else so alive, even in darkness—nowhere else so extravagantly both tender and rough.
This article appeared in the November 2022 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here.
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