Landmarks in Chicago
37 landmarks to discover with Bad Historian in Chicago.
Adler Planetarium
Your brain is going to file the building at the end of this peninsula as a nineteen-thirties idea of a flying saucer. Close enough.
Couch Tomb
A tomb in a public park. And it's not empty.
Lincoln Park Conservatory
Therapy with ferns. A Victorian glass house in Chicago.
Shedd Aquarium
The Shedd Aquarium is a Greek temple covered in seafood. Get close to the trim around the doors and windows and the classical restraint falls apart.
Standing Lincoln
The greatest Lincoln sculpture ever made — by a sculptor who basically traced.
The Art Institute Lions
The lions. One on each side of the stairs, bronze gone dark green except where the weather has scrubbed it back to gold, and both of them ignoring you completely. These are the meeting point for the entire city.
The Biograph Theater
The Biograph, and its restored marquee, look frozen in the summer of nineteen thirty-four. That's deliberate, and there's a reason.
The Chicago Cultural Center
Go inside this one. Walk in, climb the marble stairs, and look up. There's a stained glass dome up there thirty-eight feet across, made of about thirty thousand pieces of glass in two hundred and forty-three sections.
The Chicago Theatre
Six stories of red letters spelling out the name of the city, hung off the front of a building on State Street. That sign is the shorthand for Chicago in roughly every film, news broadcast, and postcard ever made.
The Chicago Water Tower
The little stone castle stranded in the middle of Michigan Avenue is the Chicago Water Tower. Yellow limestone, turrets, battlements, tiny pointed caps on every corner. It looks like somebody lost a castle and left it on the sidewalk.
The Green Mill Cocktail Lounge
The Green Mill. That crescent-moon sign has been hanging over this corner since nineteen ten, and the room behind it has barely changed. Same long mahogany bar, same booths, same low green light.
Buckingham Fountain
That enormous pink marble wedding cake in front of you is Buckingham Fountain, and every part of it is pointed at the lake on purpose. Start with the four bronze sea horses. They aren't decoration and they aren't Greek.
Café Brauer
The most beautiful building in a public park that was also, for decades, a storage shed.
Chicago Board of Trade
LaSalle Street ends here. Every bank and every trading house up that canyon lines up in two walls of stone, and at the bottom of the corridor the Chicago Board of Trade stands across the whole opening like a cork in a bottle.
Crown Fountain
Two towers of glass block, fifty feet tall, facing each other across a long black granite floor with a quarter inch of water lying on it. And on the inward face of each tower, a person. Enormous. Blinking. Looking at you.
DuSable Bridge and the River Mouth
Four little stone houses sit at the corners of this bridge, and there are bronze plaques set flat into the pavement. This is the mouth of the Chicago River.
Holy Name Cathedral
Look up. Holy Name Cathedral — the seat of the whole Chicago archdiocese, and one of the most beautiful buildings in the city.
Home Court
Home Court. Sixty thousand square feet, and inside it is a full N-B-A regulation basketball court. Free. Open to the public, seven days a week, noon till eight.
John Lewis Plaza
John Lewis Plaza — the open stone square you're standing in. Somewhere near you there's a long wooden beam, thirty-four feet of it, hand-carved and left out in the weather. That's by Martin Puryear, and he called it Bending the Arc.
Marina City
Two round concrete towers with scalloped edges, sixty-five stories each, sitting right on the water. Everyone calls them the corn cobs.
Monadnock Building
The long dark brown slab in front of you is the Monadnock Building, and it has the visual charisma of a very serious brick. I mean that with real affection. It might be the most consequential brick anyone ever laid.
Northerly Island — The Airport That Was Erased Overnight
The prairie grass ahead of you is a runway. Northerly Island was a working downtown airport until a mayor decided, in the middle of one night, that it wasn't going to be one anymore. Start with the name, which is wrong in two directions.
Reliance Building
The slim white tower on this corner is almost entirely window. Count the wall. There's barely any.
Soldier Field
Those two long rows of Doric columns are Soldier Field, or at least the part of it that's original. Everything you can see between and above them arrived seventy-nine years later, and Chicago has never fully forgiven anyone for it.
Solidarity Drive
The causeway running out toward the planetarium is called Solidarity Drive, and there are three bronze men standing in the median of it. All three were made for somewhere else. All three got moved.
Sue and the Lions of Tsavo
The east face of the Field Museum, with the lake at your back. On the other side of that marble is a forty-foot Tyrannosaurus rex named Sue, and she was found because somebody got a flat tire. August, nineteen ninety.
Sullivan Center
Get close to the rounded corner where State Street meets Madison, and look at the metal around the doorway. It runs from the entrance up through two full floors, and it's the finest metalwork in Chicago.
The Ann Dunham Water Terrace
The water terrace. There's a low stone form here that fills until it can't hold any more and then spills over its own edge, and near it an upright ring that puts out a fine mist. The piece is called Seeing Through the Universe.
The Chicago Riverwalk
Down here at water level you get engine noise, gulls, and a slow green river with tour boats sliding along it. That river is flowing the wrong way. Not by accident, and not by a little.
The Great Lawn and the Road That Isn't There
The Great Lawn. Fifty-eight thousand square feet of grass, built for picnics, concerts, and a sledding hill in the cold months. Stand still on it for a second, because a few years ago standing here would have gotten you killed.
The Merchandise Mart
The limestone thing occupying the entire far bank of the river is the Merchandise Mart, and the correct way to understand it is that this is not a building with a footprint. It's a building with a territory. Four million square feet.
The North Face — Wrapping the Pineapple
This side of the tower has the color on it. Eighty-three feet of glass mural by Julie Mehretu, called Uprising of the Sun, which is the one part of this building that looks like it's moving. Mehretu is worth a second.
The Rookery
From the sidewalk the Rookery is a fortress. Dark red granite, deep arches, stonework heavy enough to survive a siege by a medium-sized army.
The Southwest Corner — The Letters
Look up at the corner of the tower. Way up, near the top, wrapping around from one face to the other — those are letters. Concrete ones.
The Tower from Stony Island Avenue
The Obama Presidential Center. Two hundred and twenty-five feet of gray granite with almost no windows in it, which is not how museums usually introduce themselves. Find the corner closest to you, where the two big faces of the tower meet.
The Wrigley Building
The white one. Two towers joined by walkways, a clock tower on the south end, and a surface so bright it looks lit even when it isn't. That's the Wrigley Building, and the brightness is a trick.
Tribune Tower
Get close to the base of the pale Gothic tower with the crown of stone spikes on top. Down at hand height, set into the limestone, there are ragged little chunks of rock with labels chiselled under them. That one's the Parthenon.
Chicago Audio Experiences
Visit these landmarks 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.
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