Evanston

Lia and I took the Purple Line north out of downtown Chicago expecting a bedroom suburb and got off instead into a town that felt entirely its own — tree-canopied streets, a genuine downtown of independent bookshops and bakeries, and, at the end of nearly every east-west street, a flash of Lake Michigan. Evanston has spent over a century in Chicago’s shadow and somehow kept its own personality intact, equal parts college town, lakefront resort, and quietly progressive suburb.

Northwestern’s lakefront campus

Northwestern University occupies a genuinely striking stretch of shoreline, its Gothic and modernist buildings arranged around a landfill peninsula that juts directly into Lake Michigan. We walked the lakefill path at sunset, sailboats tacking offshore and students sprawled on the rocks with textbooks abandoned beside them, and it struck us how few American campuses get to claim their own beach. Just off campus, Sherman Avenue’s restaurant row gave us dinner — Evanston was famously dry until 1972, a legacy of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founding itself here, and the town has been making up for lost time ever since with a genuinely serious food and coffee scene.

Lighthouse Beach and the Grosse Point Light

North of downtown, Lighthouse Beach curls around the 1873 Grosse Point Lighthouse, a handsome brick tower built after a string of shipwrecks on this stretch of lake. Lia and I climbed it on a Saturday tour, counting the spiral stairs, and looked out over a shoreline that felt more New England than Midwest — dune grass, a small maritime museum, families spread out on the sand well past the point where most people assume Chicago’s suburbs stop being scenic. We ate root beer floats afterward at a soda fountain that’s been serving the same recipe since the temperance days, a strange and fitting bookend to the town’s history.

Getting There

Evanston sits just twelve miles north of downtown Chicago, an easy ride on the CTA Purple Line or Metra’s Union Pacific North Line, both under thirty minutes from the Loop. Chicago O’Hare International Airport is roughly twenty minutes away by car, making Evanston a genuinely practical first or last stop for anyone flying into the city. A car is useful for reaching the lighthouse and northern beaches, but downtown and the campus are entirely walkable from the train.