46 posts about this city
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Seven days, seven jobs. A concrete plan for the week you arrive in Chicago — the week that decides how the rest of your year feels.
Your friends moved, the group chat went quiet, and nobody hands you a cohort at work. The post-graduation friendship rebuild, Chicago edition.
A practical guide to building a Chicago friend group when you arrived three weeks ago, your accent is new here, and the winter is coming.
Grad school hands you a cohort and takes away your free time. Here is how to turn a Chicago PhD, MA, MBA or med programme into an actual social life.
Harold Washington, Wright, Kennedy-King, Malcolm X, Truman, Olive-Harvey, Daley — seven campuses, one problem: everybody leaves right after class. Here is how to build a social life anyway.
North Park is small, residential and tucked into a quiet north-side neighbourhood by the river. Small is an advantage — but only if you leave the campus sometimes.
Saint Xavier feels almost suburban: lawns, small classes and a tight community on Chicago's south-west side. The friendships come fast; the city takes a little more effort.
Concordia sits in leafy River Forest, ten miles west of the Loop. Small and residential means friendships come easily — as long as you also learn the Green Line.
The School of the Art Institute has no campus and no team — it has studios, critiques and a museum attached. That is more than enough social infrastructure if you use it.
Roosevelt's campus is a tower on Michigan Avenue with the whole city at its feet. Small classes and a social-justice tradition make the friendships easier than the architecture suggests.
Chicago State is small, historically Black and almost entirely commuter. The friendships here are built on programmes, organisations and shared purpose rather than dorm floors.
Northeastern Illinois University is one of the most diverse and most commuter-heavy campuses in the country. Building a social life here is entirely doable — it just has to be scheduled.
Northwestern gives you a residential lakeside campus in Evanston and a city forty minutes down the Purple Line. Most students use one and forget the other.
Illinois Tech is small, technical and international, with a Mies van der Rohe campus on the South Side. The friendships come from cohorts, labs and teams — plus a neighbourhood worth exploring.
At an arts school in the South Loop with almost no traditional campus, your crew comes from crews: the people you shoot, record, design and perform with.
DePaul splits its life between a leafy Lincoln Park campus and a vertical Loop campus. Knowing which one you belong to — and how to use the other — is most of the social battle.
UIC is one of the most diverse campuses in America and one of the easiest to disappear into. Here is how to build a real social life when half your classmates leave for the Blue Line the moment class ends.
Loyola has the rarest thing in Chicago higher education — a campus on the lake with a real residential community — and a neighbourhood, Rogers Park, that rewards anyone willing to leave it.
UChicago's social life is intense, specific and easy to misread. The friendships are there — in your house, your RSO and the coffee shops of Hyde Park — but nobody hands them to you.
A repeatable way to fill a Chicago weekend with things that put you near other people — plus the sources locals actually check on a Thursday night.
Chicago packs a year of social life into four months. Here is what happens when, and how to use the summer calendar to actually build a friend group.
Edgewater is vintage courtyard buildings, a beach at the end of the street and a commercial strip of small businesses that notice a second visit. It is the calmest place in Chicago to build a social life on purpose.
Humboldt Park has a 200-acre park with a beach, the Paseo Boricua, a serious music scene and some of the best cheap food in Chicago. Almost all of its social life happens in public — which is exactly why it is easy to join.
Rogers Park has beaches at the end of residential streets, more than eighty languages spoken in its schools, and rents that let you stay. It is the easiest neighbourhood in Chicago to belong to without knowing anyone first.
Bridgeport has corner taverns older than most Chicagoans, cheap rent, an artist community and a Sox game a walk away. It is the South Side neighbourhood where turning up twice is enough to be recognised.
Bucktown sits directly north of Wicker Park with the same bones and half the noise. That makes it one of the easiest places in Chicago to become a familiar face.
Old Town is one of the oldest and most walkable neighbourhoods in Chicago, with a comedy scene, a summer art fair and enough small rooms to actually talk in.
Lincoln Square has a pedestrian plaza, a folk music school, a summer festival calendar and beer gardens with communal tables. Structurally, it is one of the best neighbourhoods in Chicago for meeting people.
The South Loop has the lakefront, the museum campus and thousands of new neighbours in towers who never speak. Here is how to turn proximity into an actual social circle.
Ukrainian Village has the neighbourhood bars, the old institutions and the walkability of Wicker Park without the queue. It is one of the friendliest places in Chicago to be new.
Chicago's social calendar does not stop in November — it moves indoors and gets smaller, which is better for real conversation. Here is how to build a winter social life instead of hibernating through it.
A social life in Chicago does not need a budget. The city's best social infrastructure — the lakefront, run clubs, street festivals, park district courts, libraries and free concerts — costs nothing.
Going out alone in Chicago is normal, and some of the city's best rooms are better solo than in a group. Here are the places where turning up on your own is an advantage rather than an awkwardness.
Nobody tells you that the hardest part of moving to Chicago alone is week six, not week one. Here is a realistic 90-day plan for arriving without a network and ending up with one.
Chicago is one of the friendliest big cities in America and one of the easiest to be lonely in. The difference is not luck — it is whether you have one thing that meets weekly. Here is the practical playbook.
Chicago is a city of 77 community areas, and they are not equally easy to make friends in. Here is an honest ranking by how quickly a newcomer can build a social life — plus what each neighborhood asks of you.
Uptown has the best music venues in Chicago, the Argyle night market, a beach and cheaper rent than anywhere else on the north lakefront. It is also the most socially mixed neighbourhood in the city.
Andersonville still has a real main street, independent shops where the owners know your name, and one of the friendliest queer communities in the Midwest. It is the easiest neighbourhood in Chicago to be adopted by.
Hyde Park has free lectures, great bookshops and the friendliest stretch of lakefront in Chicago. It also has a town-and-gown divide that catches out most newcomers. Here is how to build a social circle either side of it.
Pilsen has the strongest community culture of any neighbourhood in Chicago — and the clearest etiquette for joining it. Here is how to become part of it rather than a visitor with a camera.
The West Loop has the best restaurants in the Midwest and almost no traditional neighbourhood infrastructure. Here is how to build a social circle in a place designed around dinner reservations.
River North has more restaurants, galleries and high-rises than any other neighbourhood in Chicago, and one of the loneliest reputations. Here is how the people who live in the towers actually meet each other.
Lakeview is where most people land in their first year in Chicago — Wrigleyville, Boystown and the Southport Corridor in one neighbourhood. That makes it the easiest place in the city to meet people, if you use the right parts of it.
Lincoln Park has a reputation as Chicago's polished, coupled-up neighbourhood — which makes it one of the harder places in the city to arrive alone. It is also full of leagues, blues clubs and dive bars that solve exactly that problem.
Logan Square is where a lot of Chicagoans in their late twenties end up, and it has quietly become the best neighbourhood in the city for building a social circle from scratch. Here is why, and how to do it.
Wicker Park has more bars, record shops and street festivals per square mile than anywhere else in Chicago — and it is still possible to live here for a year without making a single friend. Here is how the people who cracked it actually did it.
