Streeterville Apartments

The Streeterville neighborhood is a giant swath of territory sandwiched between the southern half of the Magnificent Mile and the shores of Lake Michigan. It's city living, pure and simple, and it's pretty much all here.

The top half of the Streeterville neighborhood is dominated by Northwestern Memorial Hospital and the sea of doctor's offices, health clinics and rehabilitation centers that thrive in its domain. The bottom half of the Streeterville neighborhood includes a generous array of high-rise and mid-rise condo and apartment buildings, many of them new constructions, as well as the Tribune Tower, the University of Chicago's business school, Navy Pier, NBC Tower and a string of hotels.

The shopping ranges from the upscale to the ritzy, and the restaurants range from fast food to casual dining to steak houses to haute cuisine. If you're willing to breach the neighborhood boundaries by a block or two, the options increase from substantial to overwhelming. Streeterville also plays host to a 21-screen multiplex, several health clubs and plenty of gourmet grocery options.

In the summer, you're never more than a short walk to the beach, where you can pick up a trail that extends past the Museum of Science and Industry on the south and extends up through to Evanston on the north.

High end retail beckons tourists to stroll the promenade of flagship stores along Michigan Avenue, but the shops along the Magnificent Mile represent only a sliver of the neighborhood, making it the shiny face of Streeterville, if you will. Streeterville residents would probably prefer to stroll the lakefront path or lounge at Ohio Street Beach. The beach, buffered from the city by Lake Shore Drive and nestled in between the skyline’s northern punctuation of the Hancock Tower and Navy Pier’s outcrop into Lake Michigan, might be the only true urban beach in the United States. Maybe. Streeterville locals know that the neighborhood is at once a pleasant contradiction unto itself. Like the oft-derided hairstyle of the Mullet cut, this neighborhood can be summarized as being business in the front (the Mag Mile) but party in the back (Ohio Street Beach and the Playpen on Lake Michigan).

Pinstripes offers another game-oriented night out for those looking to dust off their bocce ball or bowling skills.

A noted eccentric, the former riverboat captain built the first semi-permanent structures on a stretch of lakefront land using a boat that had run aground on a sandbar, plus rubble and other debris from the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. When the city of Chicago tried to crack down on his makeshift construction projects and shady real estate dealings, Streeter would often respond to their eviction attempts with ornery measures that ran the gamut from dastardly to deadly. He was known to chase away unfriendly visitors with a shotgun on several occasions.