Life in the Windy City: Finally Settled
I have finally done it. In a city of almost 3 million people and 227 square miles, I have finally settled into my own 220 square feet. It’s a studio apartment in the trendy Lincoln Park neighborhood on the North Side of Chicago (if you didn’t get the email with my new address, please email me at cer7173@comcast.net and I will provide you with both that and my new phone number). It’s on the ground floor, which means my one window has a stunning view of the shrubbery and the ankles of people who walk by. My blinds stay mostly closed all of the time. Did I mention that it’s small? But it’s my own little corner of Chicago, and just having a place to stay—any place—is an incredible weight off my shoulders.
When I started this blog sixteen days ago, all I knew was that I (in theory) had a job and that I was definitely moving to Chicago. The past fifteen days have been busy ones, to say the least.
My first order of business was finding an apartment. I started looking on August 4. I’ve moved once or twice (or three or a dozen times or so) in my life, so I wasn’t too worried about the search. I’d go on line, check out the Chicago Reader website (which lists the most currently available rentals), decide on an upper limit I would be willing to pay for rent, and viola—I’d have a place to stay in the city. Well, I had never looked for an apartment in a city of almost 3 million people before—the third largest city in the United States. My first (and only, I might add) search in the Chicago Reader turned up 314 possibilities. And that was just in the 60614 ZIP code. Chicago has 28 different ZIP codes; over 50 different neighborhoods. I had given myself about four days to find a place and sign a lease. I had my work cut out for me.
Of course, I could instantly narrow my search in a couple of different ways. First, by neighborhood: there are certain places in Chicago I knew I would never want to live. Take Canaryville/Fuller Park. Not For Tourists Guide to Chicago 2004 (an absolute must for anyone visiting the city, resident or tourist) describes this pair of neighborhoods this way: “If Chicago ever hosts the Olympics, this will be the perfect neighborhood to host the shooting event.” Canaryville/Fuller was definitely out. Actually, the only neighborhood I ever really considered living in was Lincoln Park. My friend and fellow MSU teacher education grad, Anne W., lives there. I crashed on her futon many, many times during my apartment search. I sort of knew the area. I liked the tree-lined avenues, the wide variety of restaurants, bars, and little neighborhood shops. I would live within a few blocks of the L (actually within half a block, as it turned out, but more on that later). Second, I narrowed my choices based on cost. I wasn’t going to spend any more than a third of my monthly income on rent, and that was on the high end. Still, after all of this narrowing, I had dozens, if not hundreds, of choices left to me.
So I started making phone calls from Michigan. I had to re-interview for the job that Friday morning; I planned to base myself at Anne’s Lincoln Park flat Thursday night, go to my meeting Friday morning, and spend the rest of Friday hiking around the neighborhood, checking places out. Well, to make a long story short, I must have walked over ten miles in two days. I figured out early on that a combination of walking and taking the L was far more convenient than spending hours in traffic just to go a couple of miles, then spending another ghastly amount of time just trying to find a parking spot. Sure, there are some neighborhoods where street parking is easy to come by, but as a general rule of thumb, the closer you get to the lake, or the more commercial a street is, the harder it is to find a place to park without paying out the nose and/or going insane.
Between Friday and Saturday I looked at five places on my own, and about five more with the help of one of the many free apartment-finding services in the city. It didn’t feel like I had seen much of what was available until Saturday, when I finally looked at a couple of apartments that I knew instantly that I did not like. The multitudinous spider webs housing large, ugly-looking spiders (is there another kind?) in the atrium ceiling was a big turn-off for me at one place (and the “bedroom” was barely big enough for a queen-sized bed), and the gritty urban feel of the three places above a frozen yogurt shop at the corner of Sheffield, Wrightwood and Lincoln streets would have been cool in college, but I was looking for something . . . professional-looking, I guess. I had a new job. I was finally living a grown-up life. I wanted a grown-up-feeling apartment, but I didn’t want to live in the hotel-like atmosphere of a high-rise (stunning views of Lake Michigan be damned). And I didn’t want to live in a neighborhood where people pissed in the streets (witnessing said urination was the deciding factor against the 1200-square-foot apartment in Uptown, just north of the trendier, prettier parts of Chicago).
So, in the end, I eschewed square footage, lake views, and a deck, for my tidy little hole in the wall on Fullerton, across the street from DePaul University and half a block east of the Fullerton L stop. It’s tiny, but it’s close to the L and it comes with its own parking spot out back. Most importantly, it’s now home.
When I started this blog sixteen days ago, all I knew was that I (in theory) had a job and that I was definitely moving to Chicago. The past fifteen days have been busy ones, to say the least.
My first order of business was finding an apartment. I started looking on August 4. I’ve moved once or twice (or three or a dozen times or so) in my life, so I wasn’t too worried about the search. I’d go on line, check out the Chicago Reader website (which lists the most currently available rentals), decide on an upper limit I would be willing to pay for rent, and viola—I’d have a place to stay in the city. Well, I had never looked for an apartment in a city of almost 3 million people before—the third largest city in the United States. My first (and only, I might add) search in the Chicago Reader turned up 314 possibilities. And that was just in the 60614 ZIP code. Chicago has 28 different ZIP codes; over 50 different neighborhoods. I had given myself about four days to find a place and sign a lease. I had my work cut out for me.
Of course, I could instantly narrow my search in a couple of different ways. First, by neighborhood: there are certain places in Chicago I knew I would never want to live. Take Canaryville/Fuller Park. Not For Tourists Guide to Chicago 2004 (an absolute must for anyone visiting the city, resident or tourist) describes this pair of neighborhoods this way: “If Chicago ever hosts the Olympics, this will be the perfect neighborhood to host the shooting event.” Canaryville/Fuller was definitely out. Actually, the only neighborhood I ever really considered living in was Lincoln Park. My friend and fellow MSU teacher education grad, Anne W., lives there. I crashed on her futon many, many times during my apartment search. I sort of knew the area. I liked the tree-lined avenues, the wide variety of restaurants, bars, and little neighborhood shops. I would live within a few blocks of the L (actually within half a block, as it turned out, but more on that later). Second, I narrowed my choices based on cost. I wasn’t going to spend any more than a third of my monthly income on rent, and that was on the high end. Still, after all of this narrowing, I had dozens, if not hundreds, of choices left to me.
So I started making phone calls from Michigan. I had to re-interview for the job that Friday morning; I planned to base myself at Anne’s Lincoln Park flat Thursday night, go to my meeting Friday morning, and spend the rest of Friday hiking around the neighborhood, checking places out. Well, to make a long story short, I must have walked over ten miles in two days. I figured out early on that a combination of walking and taking the L was far more convenient than spending hours in traffic just to go a couple of miles, then spending another ghastly amount of time just trying to find a parking spot. Sure, there are some neighborhoods where street parking is easy to come by, but as a general rule of thumb, the closer you get to the lake, or the more commercial a street is, the harder it is to find a place to park without paying out the nose and/or going insane.
Between Friday and Saturday I looked at five places on my own, and about five more with the help of one of the many free apartment-finding services in the city. It didn’t feel like I had seen much of what was available until Saturday, when I finally looked at a couple of apartments that I knew instantly that I did not like. The multitudinous spider webs housing large, ugly-looking spiders (is there another kind?) in the atrium ceiling was a big turn-off for me at one place (and the “bedroom” was barely big enough for a queen-sized bed), and the gritty urban feel of the three places above a frozen yogurt shop at the corner of Sheffield, Wrightwood and Lincoln streets would have been cool in college, but I was looking for something . . . professional-looking, I guess. I had a new job. I was finally living a grown-up life. I wanted a grown-up-feeling apartment, but I didn’t want to live in the hotel-like atmosphere of a high-rise (stunning views of Lake Michigan be damned). And I didn’t want to live in a neighborhood where people pissed in the streets (witnessing said urination was the deciding factor against the 1200-square-foot apartment in Uptown, just north of the trendier, prettier parts of Chicago).
So, in the end, I eschewed square footage, lake views, and a deck, for my tidy little hole in the wall on Fullerton, across the street from DePaul University and half a block east of the Fullerton L stop. It’s tiny, but it’s close to the L and it comes with its own parking spot out back. Most importantly, it’s now home.
posted by Christopher at
9:51 PM
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