Right.

Also, many new visitors mistake the Loop for downtown, but the Loop is really just one part of downtown. Downtown encompasses River North, West Loop and a bunch of adjacent neighborhoods where it's fairly lively. Parts of the Loop can be pretty lively at night too, especially off State St where the theaters are (I just saw Hello Dolly last night).

I mention this because there are many midwestern cities (like St Louis) whose downtowns are completely deserted after 5 which gives rise to safety concerns. Chicago's downtown isn't like that at all. It's still comparatively residential. It's somewhat similar to downtown Toronto in that the core business district clears out after 7 and the surrounding areas become more lively.

St Louis' downtown feels deserted before 5 too, as large chunks of downtown are designed to have nothing to do for pedestrians. Look at your favorite satellite images around Market and 10th: You see nice parks surrounded by buildings that are not designed to have stores. The area is full of government buildings, office buildings and parking lots that will get no use after 5, and few people even walk the streets at lunch time: The west loop of Chicago at 9pm is busier than This area at noon. Busch stadium is nearby, but look at the activity nearby: There's Ballpark village and a couple of other bars to the west, but most of those nearby buildings are still empty, and the area is all a sea of surface parking lots.

Architecture and urbanism generate pedestrian activity, and many midwestern towns are not designed for it, but for people to come from the suburbs and park near their office. You can use zoning to build lively neighborhoods, soulless collections of office buildings, or anything else in between. The many municipalities around St Louis, and their planning, also engineer world-leading levels of segregation, both by race and social class. It's no wonder St Louisians ask each other where they went to high school. The way the metro area is designed, it'd be a miracle if it didn't provide a lot of information.

That's where a lot of people get it wrong about St. Louis population numbers. Most people don't live in the city there. But, due to geopolitical activities in the late 1800s, the city was separated from the county where most people live. Therefore, population numbers for the city show 300K or less but ignore where most people live--that is, the surrounding county which, if you give the metropolitan area number, is something over 3 million people! The size of Denver metro area.