The Windy City

In Chicago you feel the pressure of infinite surrounding plains; it's a city that fills the land; even the lake, enclosing one side, allow no escape. From time to time, at the end of a long ride by tramway, train, or elevated railroad, the buildings thin out, and it seems that the city is finally going to expire. Then it springs up again, even more vigorously; you've merely reached an old border, with new neighbourhoods built beyond. And beyond that there's is yet another belt, and another farther on. But it's not only these exorbitant dimensions that give Chicago its density. Los Angeles is vast but porous. This town is made of a thick dough, without leavening. More than any city in the world, it reeks of humanity, and this is what makes its atmosphere so stilfing and tragic. Neither nature nor the past can penetrate it, but in the absence of the picturesque, it possesses a dark poetry.
-Simone De Beauvoir, America Day by Day