Explore Chicago

Explore Chicago, the Chicago tourism website, has recently gone through a major renovation, and the information on specific neighborhoods has been updated and expanded.  Check out the section on Old Town here

"Old Town is -- and always has been -- one of Chicago's great destination-neighborhoods. It's that simple.

Yet locals -- and especially locals older than, say, 50 -- find it irresistible to regale visitors with tales of what it was, not because it was necessarily better back then but because Old Town for a time seemed to reinvent itself every 10 or 15 years, and that makes for individualized sets of memories.

There was the artist era when rents were cheap, then the folkies took over Wells Street and then the hippies and then the gentrifiers. For a time, Ripley's Believe It or Not provided a certain . . . presence. There were burger places and bars with peanut shells on the floor, and across the street an adult club next to a French restaurant and down the street a steak joint next to Second City, which was across from Earl Pionke's pub. (How sweet the sounds that flowed with the beer at The Earl of Old Town.)"

Not a bad start, the page seems useful and the restaurants and other items reviewed are a pretty good cross section of the greater old town neighborhood.