THE most surprising of the many surprising things about downtown Chicago is its Tardis quality.
Seeing photographs of that marvellous skyline, or approaching it from the airport, is half-thrilling and half-intimidating. The place looks too big; you fear you will find yourself in a kind of Gotham City nightmare, crushed into canyons by the giant buildings.
But when you reach the centre, you find the place is smaller-looking and kinder than you could have imagined.
I was going to say that it felt European, in the sense of having wide boulevards, pavement cafes and greenery like, say, Paris, except that Paris would have to slow down a bit and mind its manners before you could confuse it with Chicago.
The local tourist board staff, who were escorting our press party around, said with great confidence that if we got lost and asked for directions anywhere downtown, we were guaranteed to get a friendly and helpful reply.
Which was not as bold a boast as it sounds because it is very hard to get lost in Chicago. It was laid out, after the great fire of 1871, in a foolproof grid pattern and if you want to orientate yourself you can find east very easily by locating Lake Michigan, which is right beside you and probably bigger than Wales.
I tested the tourist board theory by asking a pleasant-but-harassed looking middle-aged Chicago woman caught in the middle of the rush hour where Lake Michigan was and she was kind enough to explain that I would need to walk under an underpass to reach it.
Since this was only a test, I walked off in a different direction to the one indicated but the nice woman ran up behind me and escorted me to the entrance to the underpass, asking very kindly if I thought I could manage to get to the other side by myself. The tourist board was entirely vindicated.
Lake Michigan is only a lake in the sense that that it's filled with fresh water. Since it stretches beyond the horizon and has wide, sandy beaches and the waves lap around it like they do on a quiet day in the Mediterranean, it's as if Chicago, so tremendously far from the sea, has been compensated by being given an alternative sea without jellyfish or sharks.
Chicago's lake coast is not, as you would expect, faced by concrete apartment blocks and expensive restaurants; it's separated from the city by a wide green strip of informal, democratic parkland used by cyclists, pram-pushers, walkers, basketball players and other scruffy, ordinary people. It must be the least pretentious great waterfront in the developed world.
My trip to Chicago reinforced my enjoyment of the city's watery character because it coincided with a tall-ships rally on the wide and blue Chicago River.
This, in the middle of America, was essentially a mid-western event. There were huge numbers of stalls devoted to fishing and boating, which are major preoccupations on the Great Lakes, and, bizarrely I thought because I took Chicago to be a blues and jazz zone, bearded sea-shanty singers of the type you would find at the Whitby Folk Festival.
The tall-ships festival's organiser explained to me that the event was not primarily designed to please tourists. All Chicago festivals (which happen more than daily, both downtown and in what they call the neighbourhoods) are aimed at the locals.
This, said the organiser, is because tourists, rather than having things laid on for them and therefore being expected to look pleased, prefer, in a no-pressure way, to join in amiably with what the locals would have been doing anyway.
This I did at Millennium Park, opened in 2003 and built on 24.5 acres of old railway land and parking lots. I've concluded it must be the world's finest modern urban park because if there were one finer, it would be a wonder of the world and I would probably have heard of it.
(Diversion: The park was opened and largely instigated by Mayor Richard M Daley; you see his name everywhere in Chicago – he seems to have personally opened half the city's lampposts. This can seem worryingly Kim Il Sung-like but in fact the frequently re-elected mayor's influence is entirely benevolent; for example, he banned the sale of spray paint in the city and I didn't see a trace of graffiti there. Irony note: Chicago's many inventions include zips, skyscrapers, MacDonald's and spray paint).
It's a very busy park, with a spectacular open-air auditorium and festivals and arts events going on all round. The atmosphere is one of pure bounce. It also has quiet areas, thoughtfully-planted gardens, a bicycle station (indoor parking for 300 bikes, showers, lockers, a café, guided bike tours and rental firms) and two sculptures which are so astonishingly clever that, when first sighted, you feel like giving them a round of applause.
Cloud Gate looks like a giant (66ft long, 33ft high) globule of liquid mercury hanging in the air. It's made of highly-polished, seamless stainless steel plates and reflects curved, pin-sharp images of the park and the Chicago skyline. You can go under it and round it but you can't take your eyes off it. I noticed, though, that not many people touched it – a matter, I think, of respecting its magical qualities.
The Crown Fountain features two 50ft-high glass towers with a kind of shallow paddling pool in between. A video image showing the giant face of some random and changing Chicago citizen appears on each tower.
The citizen slowly forms his or her mouth into a pout as the children in the paddling pool hustle for position and quiver with anticipation, knowing what's going to happen next. Then, pout fully formed, the citizen spits out a great stream of water over the children, who laugh, screech and scream in extravagant delight. It's really the best of America; democratic, inventive, wide-minded, efficient and fun: Crown Fountain, 20 points; Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, putting it kindly, about 2.
Actually Chicago has a way with water. In 1900 it showed its wide-minded inventiveness by building the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which reversed the flow of the filthy, typhoid-ridden Chicago River so that instead of flowing into Lake Michigan it was flushed out by the clean lake waters and dispersed, eventually, into the Gulf of Mexico.
Which means that when you take one of the guided river cruises organized by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, you find the spectacular buildings reflected perfectly in the clear blue river and you might as well leave your camera on random auto-snap because how else are you supposed to decide among so many great views?
The guides are thoroughly enthusiastic and knowledgeable because Chicago, like the rest of the mid-west in my brief experience of it, is rightly proud of itself. For example, there is the remarkable Chicago Greeter scheme, where visitors from, say, Jewish, Polish, Irish or all sorts of other backgrounds can link up with a matching local volunteer and be shown the relevant city sights for free.
Although I think the civic, democratic and watery aspects of Chicago are its great, distinctive strengths, it does have world-class shopping, I'm told, and we did stay in what (our taxi driver said with awe) was the best hotel in Chicago – the Peninsula.
This is an interesting globalization spin-off - a Chinese-owned and largely Chinese-staffed hotel outshining its rivals at the heart of American capitalism.
Stay there if you can afford it, which, although I don't like to make assumptions, you probably can't, otherwise eat in one of its five restaurants and bars, or even all five of them in one evening.
The hotel offers a kind of guided grazing event, where you eat successive courses in each restaurant and end up, thoroughly exhausted, with an 'I deserve a medal' drink in the cocktail bar.
Incidentally, the evening included one of those chicken tikka masarla, cultural melting-pot moments when, in a Chinese hotel, I ate a braised buffalo steak from the great prairies (it was wonderfully chewy and deep-flavoured and took one of my crowns out, not that I'm complaining).
But for the best of Chicago, take a lift to the cocktail bar on the 94th floor of the John Hancock building and sip a dry martini while watching the sun set behind Lake Michigan, remembering that this is all in theory because, in my brief visit, I didn't have time to do it.
But Chicago is the sort of place you don't want to exhaust. I'll do it next time..
oliver.cross@ypn.co.uk

Travelfacts
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