River North

This guide to River North in Chicago opens on the night of April 15, 1989, when fire tore through a block of century-old lofts and destroyed nine art galleries whose cause investigators never determined. It backs up to the 1960s, when developer Albert Friedman looked at a stretch of skid-row warehouses and simply renamed the area River North, and traces how cheap sunlit lofts drew painters and dealers until it became the country's second-largest concentration of galleries. Stand among today's boutiques and steakhouses and picture the loft building that once stood in their place.