depaul university - lincoln park

the lincoln park campus of depaul university is the oldest, largest, and most active of the school's six locations.  it includes (depending on how you're counting) as many as 48 buildings on 40 acres in the most accessible part of the lincoln park neighborhood of chicago.  truly liveable, fully-integrated urban campuses like this are hard to find.  about 3,000 students live on campus, and the remainder live in off-campus housing.

there are no discrete campus boundaries.  you don't just cross a line and enter the university.  depaul is more like an area, or perhaps a "sub-neighborhood," within lincoln park.  as a result, off-campus apartments are often adjacent to university buildings.  off-campus housing can primarily be found in mid-sized apartment buildings and vintage (often historic) brick houses, brownstones, and other once-upon-a-time single-family homes that have since been carved into individual units.  the choices range from no-frills, student apartments to luxury rentals, as might be expected in an affluent, sophisticated neighborhood like lincoln park where some of the wealthiest chicago families live on the same block as beanbag-tossing, beer-drinking university students.

the interior streets of the depaul campus are relatively narrow, secluded, and subdued.  the commercial thoroughfares, however, are a different story entirely.  armitage and halsted streets are crammed with restaurants and boutiques of all stripes, and lincoln avenue is a parade of sports bars and fast-food joints.  fullerton avenue, by contrast, is just a big traffic artery and an eyesore by comparison.  it lacks the wall-to-wall pizzazz of armitage, halsted, and lincoln.

by the way, you don’t need a car to live in depaul.   the fullerton avenue el stop, which is convenient to basically everything on campus, is a transfer point between the red, brown, and purple lines.  the armitage el stop, which accommodates only the brown and purple lines, is on the south side of the neighborhood, but is also extremely convenient.