Living in Uptown, Chicago

The Aragon Ballroom's Spanish Revival facade has hosted dances, boxing matches, and now touring concerts across a century in Uptown, with its neighbor the Uptown Theatre standing a block away on Broadway, a shuttered but carefully preserved movie palace, one of the largest in the country by interior volume even though no shows have played there since 1981. The Green Mill, one of the city's oldest continuously operating bars, books live jazz most nights beneath a low ceiling that hasn't changed much since Prohibition. Essanay Studios' terra-cotta entrance, once home to a major silent-film production company, stands on Argyle Street a short walk from the neighborhood's Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants. The Wilson stop gathers the Red and Purple Lines, putting downtown within a direct ride for residents who'd rather skip driving, though the Aragon and other large venues bring concert crowds and traffic that can back up Broadway and Lawrence on show nights, spilling noise onto nearby residential blocks well after the box office closes.

Vintage marquees and mid-century apartment towers share the same blocks throughout Uptown, a mix that gives the neighborhood a lived-in, unpolished character the glossier lakefront towers to the south don't share.