It's Curious City, where we take your questions about Chicago and the region,

and investigate, report.

Explore.

From WBEZ.

Hey, I'm Jesse Dukes, Curious City audio producer.

Kiante Brooks recently asked us this question.

Why are all the really tall buildings

downtown, but nowhere else? Now, if you've ever flown into Chicago, you've seen what

Keante's talking about. A vast, flat metropolis stretching north, west, and south from Lake

Michigan, and a small cluster of really tall buildings that pop up downtown.

Sure, some neighborhoods and suburbs have tall-ish buildings, but any building taller than 60

stories is in the loop or very close by. So why? Well, Chicago's not alone. Lots of cities have their tallest buildings in central business districts,

like the Loop. And I recently spoke with two experts about why that's the case and why the loop

developed the way it did. One was Thomas Leslie, professor of architecture at Iowa State University.

And we dialed up his friend and colleague,

Jen Mason Garb, formerly of the Chicago Architecture Foundation, now in Copenhagen, Denmark,

where she joined us from her apartment. Both have studied the history of skyscrapers and how cities

develop, and as Jen points out, both Chicago expats, right? That's right. I tell people I move from the, I grew up in the

southern suburbs, Champaign Urbana, and I live in the western suburbs, Iowa. So to begin with,

we talked about how Chicago was originally a port city and the most expensive land was near the ports

around the mouth of the Chicago River. Jen Mason Garb explains why skyscrapers are almost always built on land where the property

value is highest.

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