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Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood.
-- Daniel H. Burnham, on devising his Chicago Plan of 1909
No sober soul regrets missing winter in Chicago. On the other hand, I have found the warm-weather months deeply intoxicating in what may well be America's most extraordinary summer city.
So I've pined for Chicago's summertime elixir in the two years since moving south to sweltering Arkansas after three decades in the Illinois city by the ocean.
OK, there's actually no ocean -- not a whiff of salt air within hundreds of miles. Still, Chicago does have a coastline, despite its image as a resolutely inland metropolis planted at the nation's physical and psychological heart. It remains Carl Sandburg's City of the Big Shoulders, but we'll find those shoulders bare and a touch sunburned in July or August at any of the teeming public beaches.
We'll also find other diversions, active and sedentary. On or near the shore lie opportunities for golf, tennis, volleyball, baseball, jogging, biking, inline skating, kayaking, rugby, kite flying, sailing and fishing. Several great museums and other cultural gems are sprinkled along the way.
Chicago's coast stretches for 30 miles along Lake Michigan, which plays the same defining role for the Midwest's largest city that the Atlantic Ocean does for New York or the Pacific Ocean for San Francisco. The lake is, in effect, a mighty inland sea -- the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake, stretching far beyond the horizon across 22,300 square miles to depths reaching 900 feet.
Perhaps most astonishing is the fact that where those waters wash against Chicago (with a few lamentable exceptions), the shoreline has been preserved for the use and pleasure of all its citizens -- and for millions of delightfully surprised visitors each year.
Burnham's audacious blueprint included preservation of the ``open, clear and free'' shore promised by civic pioneers in 1836, the year before the city's incorporation. Thanks mainly to the public-minded vision of Burnham and others like him, Chicago's shoreline belongs to the people. With luck and diligence, it always will.
Here is a civic miracle well worth celebrating as Chicago marks its 160th birthday in 1997, caressed by a lakefront in fine and rejuvenated fettle. This urban coast...