Chicago Streetscape

In addition to being considered as the "third coast", Chicago is also the third most populous city in the United States with 2.7 million residents after New York and Los Angeles. It was incorporated as a city in the 1830s and then had approximately 200 inhabitants, increased to 30,000 in the 1850s and reached at the beginning of the 20th century a population of 1.7 million. 

Chicago is divided in 77 communities and over 200 neighborhoods. The communities are comprised in different sides: central, north side, far north side, northwest side, west side, south side, southwest side, far southeast side, far southwest side.

Chicago has various ethnic neighborhoods including: Chinatown (near south side), Greektown (in the city’s West Loop neighborhood), Little Italy (near west side, bordered by the University of Illinois-Chicago campus), Chicago’s Mexican neighborhood (near south and west sides), several Polish areas in Chicago (and its suburbs) but the main one is located along Milwaukee Avenue, and South Asian along Devon Avenue on Chicago’s North Side.
Here are more details as for how did Chicago's neighborhoods got their names: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbXJUU33evg

Chicago’s street layout is organized in a street grid whose core is the Loop, which is Chicago’s financial district and largest concentration of skyscrapers, namely the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower), which is the tallest building of the United States.

The grid is structured thanks to the intersection of Madison Street, which is horizontal and State Street, which is vertical as you can see on this grid: http://www.domu.com/pdf/grid_system.pdf

In 1909, the City of Chicago decided to fight back against the growing menace of local residents continually getting lost and throwing temper tantrums.  To put an end to this epidemic, it created a completely new and foolproof address system. The city ordinance required them to be laid out with eight streets to the mile in one direction and sixteen in the other direction. The grid's regularity would provide an efficient means to develop new real estate property. A scattering of diagonal streets, many of them originally Native American trails, also cross the city (Elston, Milwaukee, Ogden, Lincoln, etc.)

The addresses on all east-west streets are prefixed with the words “east” or “west,” depending on whether they fall east or west of State Street.  Similarly, the addresses on all north-south streets are prefixed with the words “north” or “south,” depending on whether they fall north or south of Madison Street.

Madison street and State street used to be known as the busiest intersection in the world as this 1897 footage shows: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLlc40myPyQ

The address numbers depend on their distance in miles from the State and Madison axis lines. Odd numbers are on the south and east sides of streets, and even numbers are on the north and west sides of the street.