Flagpole installation inChicago, IL

Flagpoles in Chicago

The third-largest city in the country, with a tower core in the Loop, high-rise residential strung along the lake, and rail, warehousing and manufacturing behind it. We cover Chicago and the Cook County area, including the Loop and Michigan Avenue, Streeterville and River North, the West Loop and Fulton Market, Grant Park and the Museum Campus, Hyde Park and the university campuses, Bronzeville, Pilsen, Lincoln Park and the industrial and rail corridors out along the Calumet.

Wind here. Chicago sits in a dense urban, lakefront-exposed area, which works out to roughly 105 mph under the code your town uses. That figure decides how wide and how thick the pole has to be, so we check it against your address before we quote. Chicago runs a construction code of its own, and it names the wind figure outright: 107 mph for an ordinary building, measured as a three-second gust over open country. The same code sets the frost depth, 42 inches below final grade, which is deeper than most of what we do elsewhere. The ground changes block by block: dolomite bedrock in places, stiff clay and hardpan elsewhere, soft clay and fill along the lakefront parks, which are land that was put there on purpose. Dozens of landmark districts sit inside the city limits, and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks reviews work that alters a building in one. Downtown plazas commonly sit over parking decks and the Loop is undercut by the old freight tunnels, so we want to know what is under the spot before anything is dug.

Most of the people who call us from Chicago are downtown offices and hotels, condominium and cooperative boards, universities and hospitals, parishes and synagogues, union halls, funeral homes, ward and city facilities, and manufacturers on the south and west sides.