It's beautiful there. The renovated buildings are modern, open and airy on the inside and yet the old brick façades have been left on the exterior. The streets, lined with trees and ivy, still look aged. Nowadays the neighborhood is known for being notoriously yuppie. Part of my reporting was during a festival called the Garden Walk, supposedly a tour of the neighborhood's beautiful gardens. It's really more of a giant pub crawl. There are thousands of people drinking keg beer and yahooing. Everyone sort of opens their doors to this gigantic fraternity-esque house party and people just traipse from house to house drinking. It was amazing to me that all these people were able to affect this collegiate attitude in the middle of a big city like Chicago. There didn't seem to be any sense of big city standoffishness.

There's this website called the Lincoln Park Trixies that mocks the neighborhood for everything it's known for—its yuppiness and its homogeneity. A Lincoln Park Trixie is the prototype of the blond, late-twenties woman with a ponytail who works in PR or marketing, drives a black Jetta, gets manicures and no-foam skim lattes. The website seems like a parody but it's done so straight you're never 100 percent sure. I really tried to get them to lower the veil for me. I e-mailed them, asking them to take me on a tour so I could see it through their eyes, but they never did. They kept it completely straight-faced, and “we're so glad you want to join our club.”