Chicago

Chicago's relationship with water shaped the city in a genuinely dramatic way. In 1900, engineers completed one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects of its era, reversing the flow of the Chicago River so it ran away from Lake Michigan and toward the Mississippi River system instead — a direct response to the city dumping sewage into the same lake it drew its drinking water from, a public health crisis the reversal was specifically designed to solve.

That same river now anchors one of the city's best-loved tourist experiences: architecture boat tours that trace how the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, devastating as it was, cleared enough of the city's wooden buildings to make room for a wave of structural innovation. Chicago is widely credited as the birthplace of the modern skyscraper, and the tours narrate that history directly from the water where the buildings are best seen.

Cloud Gate, the massive mirror-polished steel sculpture in Millennium Park shaped like a liquid droplet, became known almost immediately by its nickname, the Bean, after its 2006 installation — its seamless reflective surface, achieved through a genuinely difficult welding and polishing process, has made it one of the most photographed pieces of public art in the country.

Chicago-style deep dish pizza represents a real culinary departure from the thin, foldable New York slice most Americans picture when they think of pizza — built in a deep, straight-sided pan with the cheese layered beneath the sauce rather than on top, it produces a thick, substantial result eaten with a fork and knife, a genuinely different dish rather than simply a thicker version of the same one.

The lakefront itself, running nearly the entire length of the city along Lake Michigan, has been kept largely free of private development thanks to 19th-century civic planning that dedicated the shoreline to public parks — a decision that gives Chicago one of the longest continuous stretches of public lakefront space of any major American city.