Living in Old Town, Chicago

Second City's flagship theater sits on Wells Street, its stone arches surrounded by the well-kept row houses of the Old Town Triangle Historic District. St. Michael's Church, rebuilt within two years of the Great Chicago Fire, anchors the neighborhood's skyline, and the Brown and Purple Lines stop at Sedgwick, putting downtown within easy reach. Wells Street itself carries a run of restaurants and bars that keeps the area lively into the evening. Wood-frame cottages line some of the Triangle's side streets, built quickly in the years just after the 1871 fire before the city's rebuilding codes required brick.

Wells Street's bar crowd takes a toll after dark: the sound spills onto the sidewalks on weekend nights and carries onto the historic residential blocks just a street or two away, an odd mix with the neighborhood's otherwise quiet character.

Piper's Alley and the surrounding blocks give Old Town a compact, walkable footprint, with a comedy show, a dinner reservation, and a stroll past nineteenth-century row houses all possible within the same few blocks, regardless of the hour. Weekday mornings bring a slower rhythm of dog walkers and coffee runs past the Triangle's wood-frame cottages, well before Wells Street's dinner crowd and the Second City marquee take over the block.