There’s nobody around, and we soon feel the need to go and warm up in a shopping mall. It’s 14☏ outside, Covid is still in the air, and the Super Bowl is on tonight.
Whether you use the metric or imperial system, the grid is a universal unit of measurement that enables strangers to the city to find their way easily.Ī Sunday morning in February. 2000 N State Street is 2.5 miles north 800 W Randolph Street is 1 mile west.
Every address is prefixed by its direction in relation to point zero-N, S, W, E once you have grasped that, an address itself tells you its distance and bearing from point zero. The squares were then divided into eight and sixteen to form the basic unit of Chicago’s urban grid-a rectangular 330×660-foot block with a middle alley leading to every parcel on the block.Įach block encompasses 100 street numbers, so there are 800 street numbers per mile, and 1,000 street numbers equal 1.25 mile.
The city’s large avenues run alongside these superblocks, starting from point zero, at the downtown intersection of State and Madison streets, in the Loop. The urban structure of Chicago is founded on the basic square of Thomas Jefferson’s grid, which was adopted in 1785 to survey the land as the US expanded westward.Įach section of the grid is one square mile.
