Chicago's West Side , west of the Chicago River, was where the Great Fire of 1871 started - supposedly when Mrs O'Leary's cow kicked over a lantern. The flames spread quickly east to engulf the entire central city, which was built of wood and fed the fire for three full days. Appropriately enough, the O'Leary cottage is now the site of the Chicago Fire Department training academy. The West Side also saw 1886's Haymarket Riots , when striking workers assembled at the old city market at Desplaines and Randolph streets; after a peaceful demonstration, as police began to break up the crowd, a bomb exploded, killing an officer. Six more policemen and four workers died in the resulting panic; four labor leaders were later found guilty of murder and hanged, despite the fact that none of them had been present at the event.

Though the West Side has little to see compared with the rest of the city, it does provide a good look at its day-to-day realities, having served as the port of entry for Chicago's myriad ethnic groups, now congregated in its distinct neighborhoods. Milwaukee Avenue , which stretches under the "El" tracks diagonally from the Loop out towards O'Hare Airport, has long been home to a sizable eastern European community, mainly Poles - over a million alto gether, including some 60,000 who came to Chicago during the martial-law era of the 1980s. For an introduction, stop by the Polish Museum of America (daily noon-5pm; free; ) at 984 N Milwaukee Ave, or the Ukrainian National Museum , 721 N Oakley (Thurs-Sun 11am-4pm and by appointment; free; ). Greektown , the few blocks of Halsted Street north of the I-290 freeway, and Little Italy , along Taylor Street west of Halsted, are both just a short walk from the University of Illinois subway station, on the CTA Congress line. Four blocks southeast of Little Italy is Maxwell Street and the site of the famed Maxwell Street Market . Although the city banned the market for various reasons in 1994, a new Maxwell Street Market was born on Canal Street and Roosevelt Road. It's still a lively place to visit on Sundays, when blues bands entertain on street corners and kielbasa replaces bagels among the stallholders.

Ten miles west of the Loop, the affluent and attractive c.1900 suburb of Oak Park has been preserved as a national historic district, thanks in part to its early influence on two very different but very American figures, Ernest Hemingway and Frank Lloyd Wright . Oak Park is easily accessible by public transportation: take the Green Line west to the Harlem Avenue stop. The visitor center , just over two blocks east of the station at 158 N Forest Ave (summer daily 10am-5pm; rest of year daily 10am-4pm; tel 708/524-7800, ), has an excellent architectural walking tour map as well as guidebooks and free brochures.

Hemingway was born and bred in Oak Park, editing his high school newspaper and living a normal middle-class life. Both his birthplace (at 339 N Oak Park Ave) and his boyhood home (600 N Kenilworth Ave) bear commemorative plaques, and there's an engaging collection of memorabilia at the Oak Park and River Forest Historical Society (Thurs-Sun 1-4pm; Thurs is free; $4) at 217 Home Ave, a block south of the station.

In 1889, a decade before Hemingway's birth, an ambitious young architect named Frank Lloyd Wright arrived in Oak Park, which he used for the next twenty years as a testing ground for his innovative design theories. Most of the 25 buildings he put up here are in keeping with conventional Victorian design, and few are open to the public; fortunately, however, his most interesting and groundbreaking edifices are maintained as monuments. His ideal of an "organic architecture," in which all aspects of the design derive from a single unifying concept - quite at odds with the fussy "gingerbread" popular at the time - is exemplified by Unity Temple at 875 Lake St. Though the simplicity of this angular, reinforced-concrete structure was largely dictated by economics, its unembellished surfaces contribute to a masterful manipulation of space, especially in the skylit interior, where the subtle interplay of overlapping planes creates a dynamic spatial flow. Though little noticed in the US, Unity Temple was very influential in Europe as a precursor of modern architecture.

Wright built his small, brown-shingled home and studio , nearby at 951 Chicago Ave on the corner of Forest Avenue, at age 22 in 1889, and remodeled it repeatedly thereafter. It shows all his hallmarks: large fireplaces to symbolize the heart of the home and family; free-flowing, open-plan rooms; and the visual linking of interior and exterior spaces. The furniture of the kitchen and dining rooms is Wright's own design; he added a two-story studio in 1898, with a mezzanine drafting area suspended by chains from the roof beams. In 1909 Wright abandoned Oak Park and his family for new pastures; he was eventually to design such landmarks as New York's Guggenheim Museum. You can see the house itself on a 45-minute guided tour (Mon-Fri 11am, 1pm & 3pm, Sat & Sun every 20min, 11am-3.30pm; $9). Lengthier walking tours ($9 including use of Walkman) take in the dozen other Wright-designed houses within a two-block radius. Booking the walking and house tours at the same time will save you $2.

West Side and Oak Park

• West Side and Oak Park

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