Where to eat, what to do, and what’s worth the trip across Chicago and the suburbs. Recommendations here are editorial picks; nobody pays for placement.
CPS's school-by-school progress file for SY2425, read as recorded: chronic truancy at 37.6 percent for the median school (62.6 at the median high school), 51 percent of schools in the culture survey's top two levels - and rating columns that are mostly empty, with no school carrying a growth rating. No school named, nothing re-graded.
The Loop holds 77 of the 409 placed entries on Chicago's individual-landmark register - one in five - with the Near North Side second at 43. Twelve areas listed, because the cut lands mid-tie at 12; districts counted separately; every tie shown at shared rank.
North Avenue Beach has the cleanest water-test record on Chicago's lakefront - 1.4 percent of its lab tests since 2021 at or above the swim-advisory action level - while 63rd Street sits at 10.3 percent, seven times that share. All 17 lakefront beaches ranked from the city's own 9,524 lab results, with Humboldt's inland lagoon counted apart.
On the same January-May window where CTA buses run at 86 percent of 2019 and the L at 65, Divvy logged 1.76 million trips against 998,000 - an expansion, not a recovery, and the piece explains the difference.
We read all 856 ADU-related building permits since Chicago's pilot began and counted conservatively: 201 ADU permits in five-plus years, two-thirds of them in five North Side areas. The citywide expansion went live in April 2026 - this count is its baseline.
We matched every tax-year-2025 Chicago house appeal across both stages, parcel by parcel. The Assessor granted no reduction to five in six parcels that appealed; 93% of those later appeared at the Board of Review, and 42.5% received the reduction there. The 2026 appeal season opened July 27.
Ten Chicago bars licensed to serve until 4 a.m., every one a short walk from the 24-hour Red Line. Verified against city licence records and each bar’s own posted hours, with the ones that shut at two flagged.
Chicago tests its beach water every swimming day and raises a yellow flag when the reading hits 1,000. We counted 9,524 lakefront tests since 2021. The flag flies at 63rd Street seven times as often as at North Avenue, and it is not a north-south story.
Traffic signals get fixed in three hours; a garbage cart takes fifteen days; and the pothole map has a geography all its own. We put a stopwatch on two and a half years of Chicago's 311 files, for all eight everyday services, in all 77 community areas.
Chicago has been named America's rattiest city ten years running - by a pest-control company counting its own treatments. The city's actual 311 rat ledger, all 372,251 complaints of it, tells a richer story: a 2021 peak, four straight years of decline, a July rat season peaking now, and a rat map crowned by Lake View. With an interactive report card for all 77 neighborhoods.
