I love to be near water. To me, there is nothing better than stepping outside on a warm summer day and feeling the cool breeze off the lake as the sunshine glistens on the water. It’s a chance to tune out the rest of the world and whatever stress I might be feeling that day and just think about, with a nod to Louis Armstrong, what a wonderful world it is that we all call home.
Now Navy Pier isn’t always the best place for quiet reflection.
But its place on Lake Michigan and the status it holds as one of the iconic places to visit in Chicago make it a place you can’t miss when summer arrives. And we’re so happy for all the people associated with Navy Pier about the ongoing redevelopment project and the upcoming 100th anniversary of the Pier.
Step away from your day
We’ve had the opportunity this year to feature a diverse mix of stories about what makes Chicago special in our Uniquely Chicago feature. It’s a chance to take a deeper look at the people, places and things that give the city its identity.
We kicked off the new section with a look at Chicago’s restaurants. Everybody associates Chicago with pizza, but we learned that only four of the city’s 6,659 restaurants were listed as full-service pizzerias as of Dec. 1, 2013.
We also looked at Willis Tower, Wrigley Field and the International Children’s Theater Festival that took place in May.
The Uniquely Chicago feature is an opportunity, just like that visit to the lake on a warm summer day, to step away from the great insight, advice and strategy we provide in the magazine and acknowledge that life is about more than business deals and financial transactions. It’s about the places we go on the weekends and when we’re on vacation, it’s about the people who work so hard to make it such an enjoyable visit.
And sometimes, it all meshes together on the pages. Such as when we learned that Rick Fezell, managing partner of the Midwest Region for EY, told us about how he climbed the 2,109 steps of Willis Tower to challenge his physical limits and show his people that he had interests outside of EY.
Share with us
So if you have a special place in Chicago that you would like to see us feature on our Uniquely Chicago page, please let us know. It could be someplace that everybody knows about or maybe it’s a smaller destination. The only requirement is that it be something exclusive and, well, unique, to Chicago.
We would love to hear about a place that is special to you that just hasn’t made it across our radar yet. Ideally, it will provide a place for someone else out there looking for something to do on the weekend that allows them to enjoy this beautiful city. And if you feel like there is something we missed or that there is a different aspect of our subjects that we haven’t been covering, let us know that too. Finally, enjoy your summer! ●
