Explore Chicago in Google Street View

Chicago burned down in 1871 and rebuilt itself in a hurry, which is why it has the most coherent collection of early tall buildings anywhere. The steel frame was worked out here in the 1880s, and the buildings that followed are still standing in the Loop, packed close enough that you can compare four decades of structural experiment on a single block. It is the one city where looking up in Street View is more rewarding than looking along.

The Loop is named after the elevated railway that circles it, and the L is the defining feature of the imagery. Steel structure runs above the street on Wabash and Lake, throwing girder shadows across the pavement and putting a train at second-floor height. Standing under it virtually gives you a sense of the city that no photograph from above manages.

The river is the other thing to follow. Chicago reversed the flow of its own river in 1900, an engineering decision taken because the city was drinking from the lake it was also emptying sewage into. Today the Riverwalk runs along the south bank through the centre and was captured on foot, so you can follow it below street level, under the bridges, with the towers going straight up on either side.

For the buildings specifically, three stops in sequence make the argument. The Rookery on LaSalle for the 1888 frame, the Monadnock a few blocks south for the last great load-bearing masonry tower with walls six feet thick at the base, and then any of the postwar towers on Wacker for what happened once the frame won. They are within a short walk of each other and the progression is legible from the pavement.

The lakefront is the part residents value most and it runs for twenty six miles. The path was captured on foot along much of its length, so you can follow the shoreline north from the Museum Campus past North Avenue Beach with the skyline on your left and the water on your right. On a clear capture the far shore is invisible, which is the quickest way to understand why people here call it an inland sea.

One thing worth knowing about the grid. Chicago's street numbering radiates from the corner of State and Madison and runs in eight hundred numbers to the mile, which means an address tells you exactly how far you are from the centre and in which direction. Once you have that, navigating the imagery by address becomes trivial in a way it is not in most cities.