Historic Sites in Chicago
4 historic sites to discover with Bad Historian in Chicago.
The Site of the Lexington Hotel
There is no building to point at here. The Lexington Hotel came down in nineteen ninety-five, so if you're hunting for something grand, I'm sorry. You're standing in front of the memory of a headquarters.
The St. Valentine's Day Massacre Site
You're looking at a strip of lawn and a parking lot. Some grass, a few trees, cars. It is one of the most infamous addresses in American crime, and the city's answer to that was landscaping.
The Palmer House Hotel
The Palmer House. There has been a hotel on this spot since eighteen seventy-one, which makes it the longest continuously operating hotel in the country — with an asterisk.
The Site of the Metropole Hotel
Another gap in the block. Another Michigan Avenue hotel that isn't here anymore. The Metropole is where Capone set up before the Lexington, back when the empire was still climbing — he rented dozens of rooms and turned the whole third…
Chicago Audio Experiences
Visit these historic sites and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Bootleggers, Bullets & Baloney
Al Capone ran a hundred-million-dollar beer empire, bathed three times a day, and lost it all to a tax form. A singer got his throat cut for switching nightclubs. A bank robber broke out of jail with a pistol carved from wood. Walk Prohibition-era Chicago from the Green Mill — where you can still drink in Capone's booth — down to the vanished hotels of the South Side, past the massacre site that's now a lawn and the cathedral where a man was gunned down in daylight. Most of it is documented. A few small things I slipped in myself. See if you can spot them before the reveal.
Museum Campus: Landfill of Dreams
Everything on this campus stands on ground Chicago manufactured out of a burned-down city. A marble temple holds the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex on Earth, found because somebody got a flat tire. An aquarium a thousand miles from the sea got filled by hauling a million gallons of ocean up from Key West in railroad tank cars. There's the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, a two-thousand-year-old Roman column Mussolini sent as a thank-you gift, and a downtown airport a mayor erased with bulldozers at one in the morning. Walk the lakefront from Buckingham Fountain to Soldier Field. Nearly all of it is documented. A few small things I mixed into the fill myself. See how many seams you can find before I show you.
Steel, Stone & Ego
Chicago burned to the ground in 1871 and stacked the strangest concentration of ambition in America on top of the ashes. A newspaper tower studded with 149 pieces chipped off other people's landmarks. An office whose steel skeleton went up in fifteen days. A brick tower so heavy it sank twenty inches into the mud, so you step down into 1891. Two round concrete towers — the tallest apartments on Earth the day they opened — bankrolled by a union of janitors. And forty stories up, a goddess of grain with no face, because the sculptor assumed no one would ever build high enough to look her in the eye. Walk the Magnificent Mile into the Loop to Cloud Gate. Nearly all of it is documented. A few small details are mine, set into the true ones where they blend in. See how many seams you can find before the reveal.
The Best Free Day in Chicago
One of America's oldest free zoos. A Victorian glass house. A hidden garden designed by a man who cashed in his life insurance for flowers. And roughly twelve thousand unmarked graves. All free.
The Obama Library Tour
They carved a speech into the side of the Obama Presidential Center — four hundred and fifty-eight concrete letters, each one taller than you are — and the engineers nearly couldn't build it, because of the letter S. This is the story of the most expensive presidential center ever put up, told through the things you can actually stand in front of: a tower its own architects wanted smaller, a font borrowed off a men's fashion magazine, a granite skin cut to a sixteenth of an inch, a free public gym, a garden that replaced a garden, and a six-lane road Chicago simply deleted. It is also, technically, not a presidential library. Nearly all of this is documented. Two small things are mine.
The Postcard Tour
Chicago's greatest hits, and the stories behind them. A river the city reversed so its sewage would flow toward Saint Louis. A newspaper tower with 149 chunks of other people's landmarks — the Parthenon, the Great Wall, the Alamo — bolted into the walls. Two towers everyone calls the corn cobs, financed by a union of janitors. A public library England stocked with 8,000 signed books before Chicago had gotten around to building one. And a mirrored sculpture that showed up to its own unveiling unfinished. Walk the Magnificent Mile into the Loop, from the Water Tower to the Art Institute lions. Nearly all of it is documented. A few small things I slipped in myself — see how many you can catch before the reveal.
Hear the stories behind these places
Download the app for audio-guided experiences of Chicago's historic sites.
Get the App