Lincoln Park is Chicago's establishment neighbourhood — affluent, tree-lined, anchored by the lakefront park that gives it its name and extends four miles along the shore. The park itself contains a free zoo (genuinely excellent, not a petting-farm concession), a Victorian conservatory full of palms and ferns, North Pond in its prairie setting, and running paths that constitute some of the most beautiful urban exercise routes in the country. Halsted Street is the commercial spine, with Alinea at the apex of the dining hierarchy and a descending scale of neighbourhood restaurants, wine bars, and boutiques below.
The blues clubs — Kingston Mines and B.L.U.E.S. — keep the live-music tradition alive on Halsted with nightly performances. The residential streets between Halsted and the park are some of the most expensive in the city, lined with renovated brownstones and Victorian mansions that tell the story of Chicago's upper-middle class settling in.
Lincoln Park is not edgy, not surprising, not rough around the edges — it is the neighbourhood where the city's quality of life argument is made most comfortably.