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WILD CARD The Chicago Postcard Museum keeps you posted online.

PHOTO: COURTESY OF CHICAGO POSTCARD MUSEUM

The wind chill on the El platform has dropped to that nose hair–freezing level and the plows have made a cozy igloo for your car. What’s a culture-loving individual with a hankering for a museum visit to do? Fortunately, these intriguing exhibits come to you—or, rather, your laptop—so you can explore a museum and leave your coat (hell, even your pants) behind.

Maps in the Public Square

Are Starbucks cafés indicators of gentrification? We might inherently know the answer to that question, posed on this Map Festival collaboration by three local organizations, Center for Neighborhood Technology, Openlands and Chicago Metropolis 20/20. But still, there’s something powerful about seeing a visual representation of the effect (picture a map of Chicago that looks like it’s being invaded by an army of little Starbucks icons). This slick site intends to demonstrate the ways maps inform discussions about public policy and support change. Tabbed sections with titles like “People,” “Work” and “Play” house collections of maps, each offering an often surprising bird’s-eye view of our city: the settlement pattern of immigrants, drug arrests by region, emerging arts clusters.

Get Webbed in Our favorite section is “Plans and Visions” (accessible through the home page), a series of proposals for a healthier, more hospitable Chicago.

The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory

Created in 1996, the Chicago History Museum’s two-part site dedicated to the fire of 1871 is one of the city’s longest-running online exhibitions. Its longevity can be attributed in part to its in-depth essays by Northwestern professor Carl Smith, which move beyond statistics and legend to put a human face on this ever-popular topic. In the Great Chicago Fire portion of the site, impeccably researched articles portray the city before, during, and after the inferno, while the Web of Memory section examines the fire’s media coverage, eyewitness accounts and myths. Each essay is accompanied by a gallery of artifact images drawn from CHM’s holdings, including a handwritten edict from the mayor banning smoking after the fire and a stack of business invoices half torched in the flames.

Get Webbed in Special Media features a delightful MIDI-piano rendition of old sheet music about the fire, complete with lyrics.

The Leather Archives & Museum

Did you know the leather pride flag was designed right here in Chicago? That’s just one of the facts we learned in the Leather Archives & Museum’s online exhibitions (you must be at least 18 to enter—or willing to lie about your age), which function as both a community archive and a gathering place for the fetish world. There’s a list of links to text- and image-based pages featuring transcripts of oral histories, artwork and out-of-print leather publications like the Chicago-founded Dungeon Master, one of the first magazines to offer how-to instructions on S&M techniques. The materials are pretty DIY: Some stories are spotty, and they could use some biographical introductions for novices. But the errors are slight, almost endearing imperfections on a rare, illuminating portrait.

Get Webbed in We were titillated by the kinky reading list accessible from the Online Exhibits main page.

The Chicago Postcard Museum

The Chicago Postcard Museum might seem like an exercise in irony (a website dedicated to a form of communication that’s been…supplanted by the Web?), particularly since founder Neil Gale carefully modeled his site after a “real-life” museum, complete with a Lobby home page and Special Exhibits Hall (a link that leads to rotating exhibits). But Gale is a serious collector who’s created a beautiful home for his extensive archive of antique and contemporary postcards (some with handwritten messages on back) that’s part postcard-craft tutorial, part pictorial history of Chicago.

Get Webbed in Click on the Lobby page’s Correspondence Corner icon to see new postcards that visitors have mailed in to the site.