Center of Chicago

Today is Sept 17th, I’ve officially been in the US of A for a month now. This blog has been somewhat neglected this past month as I attempt to sort out my life here.

In the picture above, you see a picture of a bus stop – this is the stop I wait at every day after school in downtown Chicago for my bus home. It looks mundane enough alright, there’s an Office Depot across the street, a Sears at the corner. That’s what I thought too, nothing too spectacular – but look closely at the address printed above the picture (grabbed from Google Street View), It reads E/W Madison, N/S State. In other words, 0 E/W, 0 N/S. Yes, this is the center of Chicago city.

Chicago as a city is structured so all addresses are a reference to this center. Numbers run bigger as they are further away from the center. Hence addresses can read 123 E Belmont or 123 W Belmont. To the average Chicago resident, this might all seem quite normal, but it was something that took me quite sometime to figure out.

For a long time, I’ve meant to find out where the reference point was from – I knew it had to be somewhere downtown, but always assumed there will be a plaque / sign / monument stating it as the center of the city. Tonight I finally harnessed the power of Google Maps, and voila – found the elusive ‘Ground Zero’.

Serendipitous isn’t it? Right at the corner where I wait for my daily ride home, right under my nose – an unassuming Bus Stop.

Tidbits of daily discoveries, all part of my great American adventure – almost equaled when I decided to post off a package and walked right into a mammoth Post Office, only to discover it was designed by Mies Van Der Rohe – but that’s another blog post altogether.

Explore posts in the same categories: Day 2 Day