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Ask questions, vote and discover answers about Chicago, the region and its people. From WBEZ.
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Chicago — like so many other frigid American cities — can’t seem to kick its dependence on road salt.
In our last episode, we learned how winter weather on both ends of the thermometer can impact the local economy. Some businesses come out on top during the coldest winters: auto mechanics repairing cars when they hit a pothole, snow plow companies shoveling out small businesses and rock salt providers when the roads get icy.
But chloride from salt is harmful to both our natural and built environments. You’d be hard-pressed to find a cold-weather community that avoids road salt altogether, but we found one!
In this encore presentation, we visit a place way up north, Mackinac Island, Michigan. Dominick Miller, chief of marketing at the Mackinac State Historic Parks, tells us about how the island deals with snow and ice in the winter without laying down a single grain of salt. And it has a lot to do with the fact that cars have been banned on Mackinac Island for over a century.
Each Chicago winter’s wintery-ness has big implications for your sanity and your wallet. That led one Curious City listener to ask us if mild winters have a noticeable effect on the local economy.
For decades, the FBI was a man’s world. Anybody else was just living in it, especially the administrative staff.
In the last episode, we learned how the bureau recruited high school girls for clerical work during the 1940s. But for decades women were explicitly prohibited from becoming special agents.
Western Springs resident Jane McCarty was hired out of high school in the late 1960s to work as a stenographer for the FBI. She held several positions during her more than four decades at the organization. Today, the former president of the Society of FBI Alumni talks about the ebbs and flows of women’s access to leadership and autonomy within the bureau. She endured a sexist work environment but later witnessed the first women become FBI special agents.
For a few decades starting in the 1940s, the FBI recruited high school girls for clerical work. A Chicago Catholic school was a go-to spot to make new hires.
From school assemblies to “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood,” Ella Jenkins was a rhythm specialist and children’s music pioneer. Her childhood in Chicago was her launching pad.
In our last episode, we learned that the first Chicago public school named after a Black person was DuSable High School, in honor of Chicago’s first nonindigenous settler, Jean Baptiste Point DuSable. It turns out some of the most notable Chicagoans graduated from DuSable, including Mayor Harold Washington, historian Timuel Black and Jenkins.
Today, we bring you a conversation about this music icon, who harnessed curiosity, life experience and charisma to create some of the most unique and prolific art of the 20th century. Jenkins forged a path in the music industry during a time when children’s musicians didn’t really exist. She persevered through the civil rights era, took ownership of her music in an industry that often took advantage of women and made the focus about children.
Professor of American studies at George Washington University Gayle Wald sat down with Curious City Editor Susie An at the 2025 Evanston Folk Festival to talk about Jenkins’ life. Wald is the author of “This is Rhythm: Ella Jenkins, Children’s Music and the Long Civil Rights Movement.”
Many of Chicago’s oldest schools are named after white men. The first named after a Black person goes back to the 1930s, and it came with some controversy.
If you pay attention to street signs in Chicago, you’ll notice imperfections and many quirks.
Paul Durica of the Chicago History Museum said a coworker informed him that North Avenue becomes North Boulevard when you’re east of Clark Street.
“And I was like, what?” Durica recalled. “And it does! And it's because here we are, now in the park.”
One of Chicago’s major arteries, Ashland Avenue, has a rich history of its own.
In our last episode, we looked at why streets like Ashland are occasionally labelled boulevards (like North Boulevard, sometimes the answer is because the street is adjacent to a park).
Today, we’re looking closer at the history of Ashland Avenue, including how it became a major thoroughfare and why the city widened it at great expense 100 years ago. (The short answer? To accommodate car traffic.) Contributing are Durica and Northwestern Professor Bill Savage, author of a forthcoming book on the anomalies and politics behind Chicago’s grid system.
Ashland Avenue is one of the longest and oldest streets in Chicago, but sometimes it’s a boulevard. Is this a misprint? Or is this part of the city’s history to promote park land?
From high-speed chases to preposterous parades, Chicago dazzles on the silver screen. Last episode, we attempted to uncover the best movie ever filmed in Chicago. What we found was that it was impossible to name a definitive best, let alone name every movie that deserves recognition.
Today, we dive deeper into movies that resonate with Chicagoans with two film critics: Marya E. Gates, author of Cinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words and Robert Daniels, associate editor of RogerEbert.com. They argue that the city doesn’t just look good on screen, it also helps tell stories that are reflective of its residents. Gates and Daniels talk about Chicago movies that highlight crime and political tropes (like “The Untouchables,” “Medium Cool,” and “Call Northside 777”), movies that bend space and time to navigate through Chicago’s geography (like “The Fugitive” and “Blues Brothers”), and movies that follow teenagers as they romp around the city (like “Cooley High” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”). Plus, they’ve got recommendations for Chicago movies that may have flown under your radar.
It’s awards season. Time to look at some of the best movies filmed in Chicago.
Thanks to the powerful force that is Lake Michigan and the urban heat island that is Chicago, the city has witnessed some unusual and extreme weather events.
Last episode was about lake-effect snow and a phrase you hear all the time: “Cooler by the lake.” But Chicago weather definitely gets stranger than that.
We’re talking thundersnow, water spouts and even space weather. Why do these weather events happen, what makes them unusual and how can you have a little fun (safely!) when they come around? We talk with Jeff Frame, a teaching professor in the Department of Climate, Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
You’ve heard it in the Chicago weather forecast time and time again: “cooler by the lake.” But how close to Lake Michigan do you need to be to feel that dip in the temperature? And why doesn’t Chicago get the same lake effect snow as Northwest Indiana? We look into the powerful force that is Lake Michigan.
Berlin nightclub in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood closed permanently in November 2023, after four decades in business. The closure happened amid stalled negotiations between the bar’s owners and its unionizing employees. Today, the space remains empty, and it’s unclear what will take its place.
In our last episode, Curious City looked into a mural that was a staple at Berlin for much of its existence. Today, we revisit an episode of WBEZ’s The Rundown podcast from just after the club closed. In asking some of the people who worked there, danced there and made memories there, it’s obvious that Berlin was more than just a bar.
“It felt like a secret almost,” said All The Way Kay, who DJed at Berlin for over 15 years. “It felt like something that you wanted to hold very, very close to you because spaces like that really don't exist.”
We talked with Kay, queer historian Owen Keehnen, DJ Greg Haus and several listeners who called The Rundown podcast to share what Berlin meant to them and what they hope for the future.
The large mural hung over the main bar at Berlin. Painted in the Art Deco style, the masculine and feminine figures in the painting watched over the nightly revelry at the storied nightclub until it closed in 2023.
On the morning of St. Nicholas Day, good kids rush downstairs to see what kind of gifts might be in their shoes. The bad kids? Unfortunately they might get a visit from Krampus, an ancient monster that has naughty children praying for a lump of coal instead.
The origins of this half-goat, half-man folklore character date back centuries, largely to German-speaking countries in Europe. But these days, Krampus is more popular than ever — especially in America, with parades, festivals, Hollywood horror films, Ocean Spray commercials and endless amounts of merchandise. That popularity is largely attributed to Chicagoan Monte Beauchamp, who first published images of Krampus in his alternative comic magazine, Blab!, in 2000.
“I can't believe what's taken place since I introduced Krampus in the pages of Blab! Magazine, which led to a book, and then from there it just exploded,” Beauchamp told Curious City.
In our last episode, we looked at a long-running holiday tradition in Chicago, Goodman Theatre’s rendition of “A Christmas Carol.” In today’s episode, we explore the origins of this very different kind of Christmas tradition and its curious local connection.
The Christkindlmarket, the CTA holiday train and “A Christmas Carol” at the Goodman Theatre. Chicago is full of holiday traditions. In this episode, we get an intimate look at the annual theater production through the eyes of our Chicago Sun-Times colleague, Stefano Esposito as he takes to the stage.
The Robbins Airport, just southwest of Chicago, was the first Black-owned and -operated airport in the country. Its founders were pivotal to Black aviation.
Lake Shore Drive has served as a makeshift runway for emergency landings. But it’s also been an *intentional* runway for planned arrivals. We go back to 1983 to get the story of how a Chicago institution helped turn our lakeside expressway into an airstrip, at least twice.
The city of Chicago owns thousands of vacant lots, and more than 80 percent of those parcels are in communities where the population is at least 80 percent Black. That’s according to a report from the Institute for Housing Studies at DePaul University. Residents and organizations are investing in these lots to improve the community.
Last episode, we learned about how complicated it can be for individual homeowners to buy a vacant lot in their neighborhood.
Today, we focus on an organization that is acquiring these types of spaces. Anton Seals, Jr. is the co-founder of Grow Greater Englewood, an organization that is doing innovative work on abandoned areas on the South Side. In the name of land sovereignty and building lasting community, he and his colleagues are transforming vacant lots into urban farms, a farmers market and a nature trail.
Buying a city-owned lot seems like a simple process, but buying one might take longer than expected. The city puts a limited number of parcels up for sale each year.
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