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

and investigate, report.

Explore.

From WBEZ.

Is it against the law to fly a kite in Chicago?

That's what several websites say, including one called dumblaws.com. But no, don't believe it.

You can't trust everything you read online, and many of the stories you'll see about weird

laws are just bogus. I'm reporter Robert Lorizel, and I've been delving into Chicago's actual laws.

My mission, to answer a question posed by curious city listener Ty McCarthy.

He saw some of those stories about archaic laws in various places, and that got him to wondering,

What are the oldest laws in Chicago?

First of all, as it turns out, Chicago used to have a law about kites.

Alderman approved that law back around the time of the Civil War, but it was only illegal to fly kites if he did it in the middle of a street.

That law isn't on the books anymore.

It was repealed in 1975.

So what are the city's oldest laws?

Well, you have to go back to 1833 when Chicago became a town.

Historian Ann Durkin Keating is an expert on that era, so I asked her to help set the scene for us.

Chicago is an outpost in an Indian country.

It goes back to being a French and then a British and then an American trading outpost, and they are largely self-regulated.

You know, it's the people in the community decide who's in, who's out, who's a problem, who's not a problem, and there is no organized government that's really making those decisions.

Town officials decided to start imposing some order on this wild place on November 7, 1833.

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