More than 20m people a year enjoy its lakefront parks, beaches, museums and bike paths.
This is the same club that commissioned the Plan of Chicago in 1909 (often referred to as the "Burnham Plan") that preserved much of the lakefront and left an enormous positive imprint on modern Chicago.
THE Canadian middle classes have long considered a lakefront log cabin in the woods for summer weekends to be as much a part of their birthright as maple syrup.
Chicago's twinkling lakefront has been an important draw, a taste of the Mediterranean in the Midwest.
But Portage's beach, which opened last year, is the first step in an effort to reclaim the lakefront.
Snowy owls have turned up at a peninsula along the lakefront best known as the former site of Meigs Field, a small airport Mr Daley bulldozed in the middle of the night last year.
The mayor, Richard Daley, has added lakefront parks, bird sanctuaries and nesting grounds, and the result has been dramatic.
Illinois's fifth district, which stretches from posh flats on Chicago's lakefront through working-class bungalows to the suburbs near O'Hare airport, is reliably blue.
Chicago's lakefront parks are interspersed with massive man-made structures that are deadly for many birds.
Last year Mr Ford withdrew the city's support for a redevelopment plan endorsed by the previous council as well as the provincial and federal governments, which both own parcels of lakefront land.
The CAP is devoted to expanding this still further, adding more lakefront parkland and boating space (Chicago already has the country's largest harbour system), and even creating offshore islands to attract birds and tourists.But Mr Daley has been tidying up the inner-city too.
