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Click a square or rectangle from the map in the left pane, and the right pane will display all the pictures I've taken in that location. Street names and numbers are in the margins to help you navigate. You can mouse-over a rectangle to see the place names (neighborhood, town, river, institution) associated with it.
I use two separate maps to organize my photos, and they are drawn at different scales. Use the CITY and LAND buttons to switch between them. CITY covers almost all of Chicago proper, and many inner suburbs too. LAND picks up where CITY leaves off, and keeps on going to the edges of the Chicago universe. I preferred to use natural boundaries (rivers) than pay much attention to official city limits. The two maps have zero overlap: no pictures are shared between them.
CITY squares are half a mile to each side, following Chicago's fundamental grid pattern. LAND rectangles are the height of a township (usually six miles) with varying widths up to two miles. I have written a longer discussion of Chicago geography for those who may be curious.
Use the STYLE button to toggle between two different map formats according to your preference. The default is simple colored tiles with natural contours while the alternate shows thumbnail photos. Only the left-hand map pane is affected.
Red is summer, yellow is autumn, blue is winter, and green is spring. Every square and rectangle on my map belongs to one season, and usually to one month in particular. For a more thorough explanation, return to the home page!
I take a long walk every weekend, and as many short ones as I can manage, but I've got a lot of places left to visit! 2028 is the soonest I could call the map "complete." The faded-color squares on the left pane indicate a lack of pictures to date. (In the alternate style, thumbnails are presented for every rectangle that has at least one picture, while the plain color tiles indicate no pictures.)
I discovered the Three Years of Chicago around Christmas 2018. For the next few years, I walked wherever I liked within this framework. In summer 2021 I decided to build this website, so I collected all my surviving photos and tagged them by location. I instantly realized how little of Chicago I had seen. To remedy this, I decided to give myself a different assignment area each season for both CITY and LAND, and to walk through these two areas as thoroughly as I could while the season lasted.
In Autumn 2021 I began my structured CITY walks with a large rectangle surrounded by North, Western, Dempster, and Cicero. This turned out to be too large to spend quality time in each neighborhood, so I adjusted my plans accordingly. What I remember most strongly from that season are the quiet Jewish neighborhoods around Touhy, and the sweet working-class corridor along the Milwaukee-North tracks. For LAND, I went southeast to study Autumn of Year 1 (Hegewisch, Burnham, Cal City, etc.).
In Winter 2021-2022 I had an appetite for somewhere remote, and I ended up focusing on Cicero to Harlem, south of 95th. Plenty of that area is in the CITY but none of it is in Chicago proper. It's quite car-centric-suburban down there, with a lot of industrial/shipping as well, so it was good training for "squeezing something out" of each square and finding interesting little details where the broad view was unappealing. My LAND walks were pretty few but pleasant, centered around Burr Oak Woods.
In Spring 2022 I wanted to focus on the Des Plaines River and went to another far corner of the CITY: west of Harlem and north of Belmont. The odd areas around Cumberland station and west Bryn Mawr are quite dear to me due to muddled accidental associations. The real work of this spring turned out to be my LAND walking, seeing quite a bit of both sides of the river from Pershing all the way up near the state line (my first foray into Lake County).
I began Summer 2022 already exhausted and figured it was time to stay close to home, so I picked North to Garfield, State to Western. The low travel time to begin a walk was a huge encouragement, like Rock Lee taking off his ankle weights. I packed in a CITY walk almost every other day and it was a load off my mind to have at least seen a good sample of these essential neighborhoods where the architecture is steadily being lost. I also had some great LAND walks in classic south suburbs, like Homewood and Chicago Heights.
I made a smooth transition to Autumn 2022 with a continued central CITY focus, covering North to 31st, Western to Cicero -- in other words, the great boulevard parks (Humboldt, Garfield, Douglas/s) and their namesake neighborhoods. The season changed fast and it was a good fit for areas already regarded as "worn out" in the 50s. I also made some industro-melancholic excursions out to Lockport and Joliet, but not as many as I'd hoped: a long trip, a short window of "October weather," and a distinct feeling of imminent doom.
I had been living right near the Orange Line for several years at this point, meaning it was quite easy to nip over to Midway, where one catches basically all the buses to points southwest. Taking advantage of this, my CITY walks for Winter 2022-2023 were within Pershing, Cicero, 95th, and Harlem. Again, that's a lot of industrial areas, intermodal yards, and post-war first-ring suburbs. The Clear-Ridge neighborhood around Midway Airport was definitely the high point for historic interest, but I became unexpectedly affectionate over several areas not often considered lovable. My LAND walks were of a wildly different tone, taking me to some far western and northwestern suburbs, mostly along the wonderful old CAE railroad route.
Knowing that I would soon move from Bridgeport to Hyde Park, and rejecting an earlier impulse to "save my dessert for last," I continued a southwest focus in spring and went deep into the Palos cultural sphere. This season marked an all-time high for messing around in the woods, which was just what the doctor ordered, and I came out not only without Lyme disease but feeling secure in my methods and the desire to see the project through to the end.
In Summer 2023 I hit up the generic "North Side" -- north of North and east of Western, including a bit of LAND at the tip (Evanston). I went in wishing I'd taken care of these areas a long time ago, before they changed too much from how I remember them in college. And indeed I discovered that a lot of familiar scenes had been obliterated or shadowed out. For balance I took some very remote trips to Lemont, Homer Glen, and Manhattan, often in the weird light of those forest fire days which came and went throughout the season, and made the disturbing suggestion of a future where walking carefree outside may be impossible.
Despite spending a great deal of time east of State Street in my everyday life, I had yet to spend a proper season of exploring there, so Autumn 2023 was devoted to South Shore, South Chicago, the Bush, and those little-known neighborhoods clustered along Torrence as it leads out of the CITY. The main LAND focus was the extremely wealthy section of the North Shore from Wilmette to Winnetka stations. My strongest memory of the experience is a nice brown omelet.
The next winter was awfully strange weather: hardly any decent snow. Here I had a choice. I could keep up my momentum, choose my target area, and experience it without snow if necessary; or I could defer to aesthetics and wait for a more opportune day, while pushing back the completion of the project. I argued it both ways but decided on the latter, and this marked the beginning of a new stage of the project. I worked from January to April to overhaul the website and improve my low-tech backend. Every picture was reviewed for quality and many destinations of the early years were flagged for a second visit. I now have over 500 walks planned to block level and I'm in a flexible position where I can tailor each day's outing to the weather. I plan to spend three years (beginning June 2024) simply attacking this list. Then I'll update the site again and take stock. As I write there are about 28,000 pictures spread across the CITY and LAND maps.
As early as 2009, my first week in the city, I was ditching college orientation to walk from Chinatown back to campus without a map. I saw a house on fire and thought, "Now I'm onto something!" Soon I had the basic idea to walk "everywhere" in the city and take a picture of each place so you could see it all at once. A natural impulse in Chicago, where the neighborhoods are so distinctive. Not until 2015 did I think seriously about what such a project would involve. I decided to adopt the half-mile square as my basic unit (i.e., to see everything is to see every square), and made a couple of false starts. Then I stepped back and figured I ought to learn more about Chicago geography, and gradually I did. I traced out the grid plan for myself and caught 19th century surveyors in their mistakes and odd decisions. I also felt that I couldn't really begin without adding one more trick, some organizing principle that would keep me interested and set me apart from the run of urban explorers (since my skill at photography certainly wasn't going to!). That's where the seasons came in. In 2019 I thought I was off and rolling, but it turns out I was still learning the first thing about composition and the practical details of walking all day. Then came Covid -- not a great time for weekend trips on public transit. Finally, in late 2021, I was able to really break ground and start realizing my simple idea from so long ago.
A different sort of answer to "Why" is that walking in new places all day long is, for whatever reason, the one thing that consistently makes me feel OK, in a life enlivened by social anxiety, depression, hypochondria, graphomania, OCD, crappy jobs, and moving from apartment to apartment so often it feels like witness protection. The problem is a simple one, like trying to write on glass with a pencil. At a certain point you start thinking instead about what the pencil can do. And so in that sense the project is the answer to a riddle. It's both the escape and the document of the escape, through which I have been able to achieve, if not perpetual motion, a nice sense of momentum, always looking for the next burning house, or as someone said, the door that does not look like a door -- but it opens.
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