Sources · Chicago Data Portal

Chicago Data Portal

The City of Chicago's open data platform. 7 datasets from the portal feed West Loop Vibe — business licenses, events, food inspections, transit, and ridership. All are refreshed weekly through the Monday pipeline.

The platform

The Chicago Data Portal is the City of Chicago's open-data platform. It hosts hundreds of datasets from city departments and several state and federal agencies whose data relates to Chicago. The portal uses Socrata's Open Data API (SODA), which is what West Loop Vibe queries on each refresh.

Datasets are licensed under the City's open-data terms. The site re-attributes the City of Chicago as the publisher on every record it pulls and links back to the dataset on each business page.

Datasets pulled

• Business Licenses — Current Active uupf-x98q

  What we pull. Every active license tagged neighborhood = "WEST LOOP" by the City. Deduplicated by location so a single storefront with multiple license types appears once.

  Where it appears. Directory, business pages, category and sub-area pages, /best/* lists, /map.

  Last retrieved: 2026-06-08

• Park District Event Permits pk66-w54g

  What we pull. Approved permits at Mary Bartelme Park, Skinner Park, Adams Playground, and Union Park. Permit-Event categories only (excludes private photography and admin holds).

  Where it appears. /events, /events/today, /events/weekend, individual /event/[slug] pages, home Today strip.

  Last retrieved: 2026-06-08

• Special Events xgse-8eg7

  What we pull. Citywide special events geo-filtered to the West Loop bounding box.

  Where it appears. /events, /events/today, /events/weekend, individual /event/[slug] pages.

  Last retrieved: 2026-06-08

• Food Inspections 4ijn-s7e5

  What we pull. Inspections from 2021 onward within the West Loop bounding box, joined to each business by license number. The most recent five inspections appear on restaurant, bar, bakery, and grocery pages.

  Where it appears. Business pages with a food license.

  Last retrieved: 2026-05-16

• CTA — System Information — List of 'L' Stops 8pix-ypme

  What we pull. L stations in and adjacent to the West Loop (bounding box slightly wider than the neighborhood so adjacent stations still appear).

  Where it appears. /transit, /transit/[slug] pages for the 10 CTA L stations, business-page "Nearest L" line, /map.

  Last retrieved: 2026-05-16

• CTA Bus Stops qs84-j7wh

  What we pull. Bus stops in the same bounding box as the L stations. Off by default on /map and visible at higher zoom levels.

  Where it appears. /transit/buses, /map (at higher zoom).

  Last retrieved: 2026-05-16

• CTA — Ridership — L Station Entries — Daily Totals 5neh-572f

  What we pull. Daily entries per L station, aggregated by year for 2019/2022/2023/2024 to compute per-station ridership trends.

  Where it appears. /transit/[slug] Quick-facts card and "Ridership trend" prose for each of the 10 CTA L stations in or adjacent to the West Loop.

  Last retrieved: 2026-05-24

Refresh cadence

All Chicago Data Portal datasets are re-pulled every Monday morning at 8 AM Chicago time as part of the weekly refresh pipeline. The full re-pull takes about ten minutes. Each individual business or event record carries a retrieved_at date stamped at pull time, which appears in JSON-LD on every business page and surfaces in the Footer's site-wide "Updated" line.

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