[The Chicago lakeshore tells the tale–a city by a lake, a Great Lake, specifically Lake Michigan. (©️ J. Crocker)]

Chicago is one of those legendary cities, and here, the legend is tied closely to the lake, a lake that has helped to determine much of what we know and learn about this city, whether we reside here or not. As is so often the case, location determines destiny, and in Chicago, the city’s origins at the southern end of the connected Great Lakes and near the headwaters of the Mississippi River basin assured that it would become the center for Midwestern business: economic, social, cultural, and educational activities, becoming a crossroads for human and urbanatural activities of all kinds. By 1916, it became a focal point for Carl Sandburg, a quintessential American poet who produced a quintessential American poem:

[Wrigley Field, the iconic Chicago baseball park, historic 1916 home for America’s pastoral game, a sport that takes even the most urbanized of Americans and transmits them back to the pastoral origins of one of the youngest nations on earth. Many of the cities of Europe, Asia, and Africa are millennia old, while the U. S. of A. is a mere 242 years old as I write these words, a nation with a number of the world’s greatest cities, and also a number of equally famous natural areas, and of course, a number of earth’s quintessential urbanatural spaces.]