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. It's the largest Tiffany dome in the world. It's free. It has been free the whole time. Most of Chicago doesn't know it's here.
The reason any of this exists starts with the fire.
When Chicago burned in eighteen seventy-one, it lost somewhere between two and three million books. Every library, public and private, gone in a night. And in London, a man named A. H. Burgess had an idea, took it to the writer Thomas Hughes, and the two of them organized what got called the English Book Donation — a campaign asking British readers to send books to a city that had none. Eight thousand volumes crossed the Atlantic. Benjamin Disraeli sent books. John Stuart Mill sent books. Tennyson sent books. Queen Victoria personally sent a biography of her late husband with her signature in
the front.
Chicago had no library building to put them in. So the first free public library in this city's history opened inside a leftover iron water tank that had survived the fire. A round metal tub. With bookshelves in it. Eight thousand donated English books and a reading room made out of plumbing.
Twenty-five years later, this is what those books grew into. The city built a palace, with Ca
