Paddlesteamers still ply the Mississippi River and Chicago (Illinois)

Paddlesteamers still ply the Mississippi River

Paddlesteamers still ply the Mississippi River: If you care to end your visit with an antebellum adventure, paddle-steamers set sail several times a day from the wharf at the foot of Canal Street. Cruises can be as brief as a two-hour tour around the area, as delightful as a dinner cruise complete with Dixieland band, or as wicked as a 10-day voyage, which floats along the Mississippi River through beautiful riverports like Natchez and Memphis all the way to St Louis, Missouri, in the Midwest.

Paddlesteamers still ply

THE MIDWEST:

The Midwest, popularly known as the Heartland, is the industrial and agricultural core of the US. From the Great Lakes across the prairies to the Great Plains, the Midwest is dominant in dairy and pig farming, corn and wheat, but it is also an industrial center specializing in steel, rubber, and car manufacture.
Chicago is the transportation hub of the Midwest, main junction for the national railroad system, and today blessed one might even say cursed with one of the world's busiest airports. lIn the neighboring state of Michigan, it's still an economic truth that if car capital Detroit sneezes, America catches a cold. These two cities have achieved their industrial and commercial preeminence with a rich and fascinating
ethnic mix that makes them vibrant centers of cultural activity, too

Chicago (Illinois)

Braced against the shores of Lake Michigan, Chicago is a brash place with a proud urban identity. Often called America's Second City, second that is to New York, this is the birthplace of legends of the Mob, the electric blues, and, reputedly, the pizza. H.L. Mencken called Chicago the literary capital of the United States, and writers from Nelson Algren to Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow have been keepers of the flame. The Chicago comedy troupe 'Second City Players' spawned Steve Martin, John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and the Saturday Night Live TV show. Chicago's nickname of the Windy City has attributed to both the filibustering techniques of Chicago politicians (defeating bills by talking them out past their allotted time) and to the boastful promotions for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. The town does also draw very chilly
winds from the lake, but that's not how it got its nickname.

Paddlesteamers still ply

Chicago Thanksgiving Parade is a lively affair

A delightful surprise for many first-time visitors is the 15- mile (24km) stretch of sandy beaches and green parkland along the lakefront of this resolutely commercial city. Unlike other cities on the Great Lakes, Chicago reserved most of the land along the lakeshore for parks and residential neighborhoods and did not allow factories. This means plenty of opportunities to sunbathe, swim, or fish, just a few blocks
from the major centers of town.

The city that showed the world how to build skyscrapers learned the technique from necessity. In 1871, a fire swept through the largely wood-built town -scarcely 30 years old-leaving 100,000 homeless. Chicago had to rebuild in a hurry, with new fireproof structures making maximum use of available ground space. The architects who worked out how to construct a building around a metal skeleton, so that it could 'go as high as you like' but with elegance and style, became collectively known around the world as the Chicago School.
They included Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, and, later, Mies van der Rohe. Frank Lloyd Wright also worked in the Chicago area but is better represented by his residential architecture.
The population of Chicago has recorded as 2.7 million in 2013-a a big city by any standards, but still, a long way behind New York, giving occasionally defensive air to the 'Second City but also acting as a spur to achievement. It was inevitable that the town's proud architectural tradition would prompt it one day to build something higher than New York's pinnacles and, sure enough, the Willis Tower held rank as the world's tallest building until it was outdistanced in 1996 by the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Paddlesteamers still ply

The Chicago Symphony (http://cso.org) is one of the world's great orchestras and the Art Institute is a museum of international renown. But the people themselves, rather than aspiring to the sophistication of Manhattanites, have a distinctively warm and cheerfully sardonic attitude to life that makes them much more approachable in public places. The old image of gangland machine-gunnings is hard to live down, but you'll not find any monuments to Al Capone, and the Mafia is no more influential here than in any other wealthy American city. There's an Anglo-Saxon business establishment, but the public tone is set much more by the Irish, Polish, German, Italian, African-American, and Jewish segments of the population.
The Chicago Transit Authority (CTA;www.transitchicago.com) runs a very efficient bus system, and taxis are not too expensive, but for once we recommend renting a car to move around the city, except in the congested downtown area, if you're staying more than a day. Orientation is easy: the city center is known as the Loop, after the elevated railroad track that loops around the Downtown business district immediately south of the Chicago River. The other neighborhoods are defined in geographical relation to the Loop -North Side, South Side, and West Side.

Paddlesteamers still ply

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