Location from The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
The real Chicago — a modern American city of steel, glass, and deep winters, with a supernatural underworld running beneath the surface that most people never see.
Chicago is Harry Dresden's city, and it's trying to kill him most of the time. On the surface it's three million people going about their lives — commuters on the L, tourists on Michigan Avenue, college kids in Wrigleyville, workers in the Loop. Deep-dish pizza, lake-effect wind, Cubs games, corrupt aldermen, potholes that could swallow a Volkswagen. A real city with real problems that don't involve vampires. But Chicago sits on a convergence of ley lines that makes it one of the most supernaturally active cities on the planet. The Unseelie Accords recognize it as a free city — no single supernatural nation controls it, which means every supernatural nation wants to. The Red Court had a presence until the war. The White Court operates out of the suburbs through the Raith family. Gentleman Johnny Marcone runs organized crime with the precision of a Fortune 500 CEO and recently became the first vanilla mortal Freeholding Lord under the Accords. The Fomor moved into the power vacuum after the Red Court fell. And underneath it all, literally, Undertown stretches for miles — tunnels and chambers that predate the Great Fire, inhabited by things that haven't seen sunlight in decades. Harry Dresden is Chicago's only openly practicing wizard. His ad is in the Yellow Pages. He's also the Winter Knight, a Warden of the White Council, and the Warden of Demonreach. The city doesn't know most of that. The city knows him as the guy you call when something weird happens and the police can't explain it.
Steel and glass towers along the lakefront, elevated trains rattling through the Loop, narrow alleys between brownstones where the streetlights flicker. A city of neighborhoods — each one with its own feel, its own secrets, its own things that come out after dark.
Also known as: Chicago, the Windy City, Chi-Town