About

About West Loop Vibe

Edited by Mohammad Saleem. Hand-tended since April 2023.

Mohammad Saleem is a West Loop resident who built this site to make the neighborhood easier to know for the people who live, work, and visit here. He keeps it deliberately quiet: every fact is sourced from a public dataset, no editorial opinions, no rankings, no reviews — just a tended index of what the City of Chicago says is here, kept fresh each week.

A small, hand-tended guide to the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. It tracks 1,876 active businesses and 33 upcoming events, all pulled from public data and refreshed each week.

Where the data comes from

Every listing and event on this site cites a specific public data source. The build fails if any record is missing a citation. Here's where each piece of data comes from:

• Business listings — City of Chicago: Business Licenses — Current Active (dataset uupf-x98q). We pull every license tagged neighborhood = "WEST LOOP" by the City and deduplicate by location. Retrieved 2026-05-19.
• Park events — City of Chicago: Park District Event Permits (dataset pk66-w54g). Filtered to Mary Bartelme Park, Skinner Park, Adams Playground, and Union Park; approved permits only; Permit - Event categories only (excludes private photography and admin holds).
• Citywide events that fall in West Loop — City of Chicago: Special Events (dataset xgse-8eg7). Geo-filtered to the West Loop bounding box.
• Phone numbers, websites, and opening hours — OpenStreetMap contributors, via the Overpass API.
• Short descriptions and menu / reservation links on some businesses — paraphrased from each business's own public website. Used only as a third tier of data, after the City of Chicago and OpenStreetMap. We don't override anything the City or OSM already provided; we only fill in what those didn't. Each enriched listing links back to the website it was summarized from, with the date we last verified it. A coverage log is kept at audit/enrichment-coverage.md.
• CTA L stations — City of Chicago: CTA System Information — List of 'L' Stops (dataset 8pix-ypme). Filtered to a bounding box just wider than the neighborhood so adjacent stations still appear. Retrieved 2026-05-16.
• CTA bus stops — City of Chicago: CTA Bus Stops (dataset qs84-j7wh). Same bounding box as the L stations; off by default on the map and visible at higher zoom levels. Retrieved 2026-05-16.
• Food inspections — City of Chicago: Food Inspections (dataset 4ijn-s7e5). We pull inspections from 2021 onward within the West Loop bounding box and join each one to its business by license number. The most recent five inspections show up on restaurant, bar, bakery, and grocery pages. Retrieved 2026-05-16.
• Map tiles — OpenFreeMap / OpenMapTiles, with data from OpenStreetMap contributors. Free, no API key.

Published guides we reference

A few well-established West Loop dining guides come up repeatedly in research, and several of our business pages cite them via a Featured in N published guides line. We treat these guides as cross-references — we do not reproduce their rankings, taste judgments, or editorial copy. The list below names every guide we currently cite:

• Choose Chicago — Restaurants in Chicago’s West Loop
• The Infatuation — West Loop Restaurants
• A Beautiful Plate — Chicago Restaurant Guide
• Gina on a Plane — Best Restaurants in West Loop
• Chicago Food Tours — 5 Best Restaurants in West Loop

Analytics

We use Google Analytics to count aggregate page views — which sections of the site are useful, which businesses neighbors look up most, that kind of thing. This helps us decide what to build next. We don't sell or share visitor data, and we don't run ads.

How this site is built

For the full data-sources breakdown, refresh cadence, schema strategy, closure mechanism, and a list of what this site deliberately doesn't do, see the methodology page. For the running log of business closures and stale-OpenStreetMap records discovered during enrichment, see corrections.

Corrections

Found something wrong? Because every fact on this site is cited to a public dataset, the most durable way to fix it is to fix the source — and the correction will flow back to West Loop Vibe on the next weekly refresh:

• Wrong name, address, ward, or licenses — the data comes from the City of Chicago. Inaccuracies here are usually because the business needs to update its license record with the city. City contact info →
• Wrong phone, website, hours, or a closed business still listed — that data comes from OpenStreetMap. Anyone can edit it. Edit on OpenStreetMap → Changes you make there will be reflected here on the next Monday rebuild.
• A bug on the site itself, or a question about how it works — reach out via the project's repository (link coming when the repo is made public).

Thanks for stopping by. If you live here, work here, or visit — hope this makes the neighborhood a little easier to know.