Chicago: The Riverwalk & Loop Treasures

On the night of October eighth, eighteen seventy-one, fire broke out in a barn on the southwest side. The city had endured a dry summer. The buildings were wood. The wind off the prairie was blowing northeast. In the space of two days, the Great Chicago Fire destroyed roughly seventeen thousand five hundred buildings and left over a hundred thousand people homeless. The fire burned for thirty hours. It consumed the Loop entirely. It jumped the river. It reached the lakefront.

What happened next defines the city you are walking through today. Chicago did not mourn for long. Within weeks, developers and architects began rebuilding on the ashen grid. Because every building was gone, there were no existing structures to work around, no old floor plans to accommodate, no neighbourhood committees defending what had been. The fire had created a blank slate four square miles wide in the heart of a rapidly growing American city. Architects from across the country arrived, and they brought ideas.

The Chicago School of Architecture was born from that blank slate. William Le Baron Jenney built the Home Insurance Building in eighteen eighty-four using an internal steel skeleton rather than load-bearing masonry walls — the first true skyscraper. Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root, Dankmar Adler, and a young Frank Lloyd Wright followed. The ornamental vocabulary, the structural logic, the way buildings meet the street and address the sky — Chicago invented the modern city in the two decades after the fire.

The river you are looking at was, for much of that era, a working waterway carrying grain, livestock, and industrial cargo. The Riverwalk you are standing on was not completed until twenty sixteen. But the architecture it passes beneath is the legacy of that extraordinary post-fire generation.

When you are ready, turn and walk west along the walkway. The Wrigley Building and Tribune Tower will come into view as you pass under the Michigan Avenue Bridge.

But the competition's real legacy was a submission that did not win. The Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen entered a design that stripped away the historical ornament and proposed a tower that stepped back as it rose, with vertical piers creating a sense of soaring movement. Saarinen came second. But his entry was so far ahead of its time that American architects studied it obsessively, and it directly shaped the Art Deco skyscrapers of the nineteen twenties and thirties — including the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building in New York. The losing entry changed architecture more than the winning one.

Now look at the building at street level. Embedded into the limestone walls are fragments of famous structures from around the world — one hundred and forty-nine pieces of stone and brick collected by Tribune correspondents over decades. You will find a fragment of the Parthenon from Athens, a piece of the Great Wall of China, stone from Notre-Dame de Paris, a chunk of the Taj Mahal, a piece of the Berlin Wall, fragments from Westminster Abbey, the White House, and Fort Sumter. Small plaques identify each one.

Walk slowly around the base and read them. It is one of Chicago's best free activities: a museum of world history embedded in the wall of a newspaper building. McCormick himself was a collector in this vein — he instructed Tribune foreign correspondents to send back a fragment wherever they travelled, and the practice continued for decades. Some of the stones were given freely by governments or curators. Others were chipped off in moments that would today be considered vandalism. A piece of the original Globe Theatre in London is here. A stone from Abraham Lincoln's tomb in Springfield is set into the base. A fragment of the moon — technically lunar meteorite, not an Apollo sample — was added in later years.

The Tribune moved its offices out in twenty eighteen when the tower was converted to luxury apartments. But the stones remain, and the Gothic crown still dominates the Michigan Avenue skyline, pointing upward with the same medieval confidence it has had for a century. Across the bridge, the Wrigley Building waits — and that contrast, dark Gothic limestone facing blinding white terra-cotta, is your next destination.

The trick that makes the building work is the glaze. The exterior uses over two hundred and fifty thousand individually fired terra-cotta tiles in six different shades of white, graduated so that the building gets progressively brighter toward the top. In direct sunlight, the uppermost floors are almost painful to look at. On grey winter days, they still glow. At night, the building has been floodlit since nineteen twenty-one, making it one of the first structures in the world to use architectural lighting as a deliberate design element.

Stand at the river's edge and look at both buildings together — the white Wrigley and the dark Tribune facing each other across the bridge, framing the river as it bends toward the lake. This is the view that established the Michigan Avenue corridor as the Magnificent Mile, and it is one of the great urban compositions in America. Every architect who has built in Chicago since has had to work in relationship to this moment.

Wrigley's south tower was deliberately positioned to close the view up Michigan Avenue from the south, so that anyone walking north from the Loop would have a grand white tower as their destination — a visual full stop that drew people forward. It worked. The block between the Wrigley Building and Oak Street to the north became the most expensive commercial real estate in the Midwest.

The river below you, by the way, runs green on Saint Patrick's Day every year. Since nineteen sixty-two, the Chicago Plumbers Union has dyed the Chicago River emerald green for the holiday. They use a vegetable-based dye — the exact formula has been a closely guarded secret for decades. The river stays green for several hours. It is the most Irish thing a midwestern river can do, and Chicago does it without apology every March.

The Chicago River itself runs backwards. Literally. In nineteen hundred, the city reversed the flow of the river by completing a drainage canal that redirected the current away from Lake Michigan and toward the Mississippi River watershed. The river had been flowing into the lake, carrying industrial and sewage waste with it and contaminating the city's drinking water. The reversal was one of the greatest feats of civil engineering of its era, and the river has been flowing west ever since. The city literally turned a river around. That is a very Chicago thing to have done.

Marina City was the first major mixed-use high-rise in America. The lower eighteen floors of each tower are an open-air parking garage — you can still see the cars spiralling up the building from outside, like a helix of steel and chrome. Above the garage are restaurants, a hotel, an ice rink, a swimming pool, a bowling alley, a theatre, and boat slips for a marina right on the river. And above all of that, on floors twenty through sixty, are the apartments — pie-shaped wedges radiating from a central concrete core, each with a semicircular balcony and river views.

The design is pure nineteen sixties futurism, and it should not work as well as it does. Goldberg had studied under Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology, but he rejected his mentor's insistence on right angles and steel-and-glass rectangles. Goldberg believed that curved buildings were more humane than rectangular ones — that organic forms matched the way people actually moved and lived. Marina City was his manifesto. Mies himself, when he saw the towers, is said to have been dismissive. He preferred his steel grid. But history has been kinder to Goldberg's corncobs than Mies might have expected.

The project was also politically radical. Marina City was developed in partnership with the Building Service Employees Union, whose members built it and then moved into it. The union financed part of the development specifically to demonstrate that working people could live downtown, not just in the distant suburbs. The towers were designed to be affordable urban housing from the beginning — not a luxury project, but a statement about who belonged in the city centre.

The towers appear on the cover of the Wilco album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, recorded in Chicago in two thousand and one and widely regarded as one of the great American albums of its era. The image — the two corncobs rising against a grey sky — became an icon of a certain kind of Chicago aesthetic: industrial, cold, strange, beautiful. But they belong to everyone. From the Riverwalk at their base, looking straight up between the two cylinders, is one of those architectural views that makes you feel the full weight of the city pressing down on you in the best possible way.

From river level, you are seeing it from the angle the architects intended. The green glass — tinted to complement the Chicago River's characteristic colour — catches the light differently through the day. In morning sun it is almost gold. In overcast light it turns a deep forest green. At sunset, when the western sky goes orange and the river reflects it, the whole curve of the building ignites.

The building sits at the confluence of the Chicago River's two branches, where the main stem and the south branch meet. This was one of the most important geographical points in early Chicago — the spot where the portage between the Chicago and Des Plaines Rivers gave canoe traders access to both the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system. The Potawatomi people knew this place well. French voyageurs paddled through here carrying beaver pelts east and trade goods west. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, a Haitian-born trader often credited as Chicago's first permanent non-indigenous settler, established his homestead near the mouth of the river in the seventeen eighties. Before the city existed, before the fire, before the skyscrapers, this bend in a shallow river was the reason Chicago was here at all.

The postmodern context-sensitivity of three thirty-three West Wacker was part of a broader shift in American architecture in the early nineteen eighties. The previous generation, led by Mies van der Rohe, had insisted that buildings ignore their context and speak only in the language of steel and glass. The new generation — Robert Venturi, Philip Johnson, and firms like Kohn Pedersen Fox — argued that buildings should respond to their surroundings, reflect their site, and communicate with the street and the river around them. Three thirty-three West Wacker is one of the clearest demonstrations of that argument ever built.

Look at the water level one more time before you leave the river. The Riverwalk has brought the city down to the water's edge in a way that was unimaginable when this was an industrial waterway lined with loading docks. From here, turn away from the river and walk south toward LaSalle Street. You are entering the heart of the Loop.

The Art Deco exterior is extraordinary. Look at the setbacks as the tower rises — each step back is ornamented with abstracted figures and geometric patterns in the limestone, representing the commodities traded inside: corn, wheat, cattle, and labour. The building reads differently at different distances. From a block away, the tower dominates. From directly below, at the base of the canyon, you see the ornamental detail and the sheer scale together.

Louis Sullivan, the architect who gave the Chicago School its philosophical foundation, wrote that a tall building 'must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exaltation from bottom to top.' The Board of Trade is one of the best examples of that principle in the world. Every inch of this building rises with intention. Nothing is wasted. The limestone is warm in morning light. The setbacks create a stepped silhouette that reads clearly from the street, from the river, from across the park. It is a building that knows what it is.

Inside the trading floor — which you cannot visit, but which has existed here since the building opened — the atmosphere was for decades one of the most intense in American commerce. Open-outcry futures trading meant hundreds of traders shouting, waving, and signalling simultaneously in a physical pit. The noise was audible from the street. The system persisted at the Board of Trade long after electronic trading had replaced it elsewhere, because the traders themselves fought to keep it. The last open-outcry agricultural futures trading at the Board of Trade ended in two thousand and fifteen.

Sullivan himself is buried at Graceland Cemetery on the North Side, in a grave he designed himself — a simple geometric block that is one of the most beautiful memorials in the city. He died in relative poverty in nineteen twenty-four, in a small hotel room on the North Side, with barely enough money for a proper funeral. Frank Lloyd Wright, his most famous protege, helped pay the costs. The city Sullivan had helped invent barely noticed when he died. It would spend the rest of the century slowly recognising what it had lost.

State Street has been Chicago's main commercial street since before the fire. After the Great Chicago Fire of eighteen seventy-one, the entire street was rebuilt from scratch, and the scale of the rebuilding produced what became one of the great retail corridors in America. Marshall Field opened his department store here in the eighteen sixties and expanded it into an eight-story Beaux-Arts block that occupied an entire city block. Field's became Macy's in two thousand and six, a transaction that still generates genuine grief among certain Chicagoans.

But the great architectural legacy of State Street is not the shops. It is Louis Sullivan's Carson Pirie Scott building — now Sullivan Center — at the southeast corner of State and Madison, about a block north of where you are standing. Sullivan completed the original section in eighteen ninety-nine and added the rotunda entrance and additional bays in nineteen oh four. The cast-iron ornament around the entrance — intricate botanical forms, interlaced vines, geometric patterns of almost hallucinatory complexity — is the finest decorative ironwork on any commercial building in America. Run your fingers across it if you can get close enough. Sullivan believed ornament was not applied to architecture but grew from it, like leaves from a branch.

Chicago's Blues and Jazz heritage is woven into this part of the city. The Great Migration, which brought hundreds of thousands of Black Americans from the South to northern industrial cities between nineteen ten and nineteen seventy, transformed Chicago's music scene permanently. Musicians from Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana arrived in Chicago and took the Delta Blues — raw, spare, acoustic — and electrified it, speeded it up, and added drums and horns. Chicago Blues, the sound of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf and Buddy Guy, was born on the South Side. Jazz, which had developed in New Orleans, found a second home on the North Side in the clubs along North Clark Street. This city did not just build skyscrapers. It built the soundtrack that the rest of the world borrowed.

Walk north to the corner of State and Randolph. The Cultural Center — Chicago's Beaux-Arts public building with its Tiffany glass domes — is one block east if you have time. The el rumbles overhead again. Down on State Street, the city moves at its own pace.

Cloud Gate is Anish Kapoor's name for the sculpture. One hundred and sixty-eight stainless steel plates, welded together and polished until the seams disappeared, forming a shape that the artist says was inspired by liquid mercury. The reflective surface curves around itself so that it captures the city skyline from every angle simultaneously. Walk around it slowly. The buildings bend. The sky wraps. Your reflection multiplies.

Stand directly underneath, in the concave chamber Kapoor calls the omphalos — Greek for navel. Look up. The reflection inside the dome inverts the world, creating a symmetrical tunnel of reflected images that seems to extend infinitely upward. Children, who have no inhibitions about lying on the pavement to look straight up, understand it best.

The engineering is as striking as the aesthetics. The sculpture weighs one hundred and ten tons and rests on a foundation concealed beneath the plaza surface. There are no visible supports. The plates were fabricated in various locations and transported to Chicago for assembly — the final polishing took years, because every seam had to be eliminated, every panel brought into perfect alignment.

Kapoor is British-Indian, born in Mumbai, trained in London, and the Bean has become more thoroughly identified with Chicago than almost anything made by a native. The city adopted it instantly. It appears on every postcard, every phone case, every piece of tourist merchandise. It is one of those rare public artworks that everyone agrees works — that does what public art is supposed to do, which is give a city a symbol of itself that it could not have invented any other way.

Kapoor had wanted to call it Cloud Gate because the arch you can walk through creates a threshold — a gate between the city and the sky reflected in the steel. The Bean nickname emerged immediately and stuck. Kapoor resisted it for years. The city ignored him. Cloud Gate is its legal name. The Bean is what it is called.

Millennium Park itself was a transformation story as remarkable as the Bean. The site had been a working railyard and underground parking structure. It was uglier than anything in its neighbourhood and sat directly between the Loop and the lakefront. The city covered it with twenty-four acres of park, gardens, and public art, using a deck structure that allowed trees and grass to grow above active rail lines. The project was delivered four years late and came in at roughly four hundred and seventy-five million dollars, far over its original budget. Every single dollar of overrun has been repaid in tourism, property value, and civic joy.

The Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Frank Gehry's outdoor concert stage with its stainless steel ribbons and lawn trellis of speakers, is directly south. Free concerts run through the summer. The Lurie Garden behind it is quiet and often empty. But the Bean is what brings the city here. Walk around it one more time before you go south toward the Art Institute.

Daniel Burnham, who had led the construction of the fair with extraordinary organisational genius, went on to draft the Plan of Chicago in nineteen oh nine, the first comprehensive city plan in American history. It gave the city its lakefront parks, its park boulevard system, and the principle — still legally enforced — that the lakefront belongs to the people and cannot be privatised. The view you have had all day of the lake from the park is a direct result of Burnham's plan.

The Art Institute itself has been rated among the finest museums in the world, and the collection is extraordinary across every department. Georges Seurat's 'A Sunday on La Grande Jatte' is here — the pointillist masterpiece that took two years to complete and changed painting. Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks' is here, perhaps the most emotionally resonant painting in American art. Grant Wood's 'American Gothic' is here. The Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection rivals anything outside Paris.

Take an hour inside if you can. The Thorne Miniature Rooms — sixty-eight tiny furnished interiors at one-to-twelve scale, representing historical rooms from Europe and America — are unlike anything in any other museum. The Renzo Piano modern wing, added in two thousand and nine, doubled the gallery space and gave the museum one of the most beautiful contemporary art halls in America. The Japanese woodblock print collection is one of the finest outside Japan. The architectural fragments collection — pieces of demolished Chicago buildings preserved behind glass — is a ghost museum of the city that no longer exists.

The building itself is worth time. The main entrance on Michigan Avenue, flanked by those two bronze lions, leads into a Beaux-Arts hall of marble and coffered ceilings that announces you are somewhere that takes culture seriously. The railroad bridge that connects the original building to the Modern Wing — a pedestrian walkway suspended over the Metra tracks — gives you a view down into the rail corridor that brings commuters in from the suburbs each morning. It makes you understand how close the working infrastructure of the city runs beneath the cultural surface.

The lake wind comes off Michigan Avenue cold and direct. Pull your collar up. The last stop is just a short walk south.

You are now standing in Grant Park, the living room of Chicago's lakefront. The park stretches from Randolph Street south to Roosevelt Road, kept open and public by the legal legacy of Aaron Montgomery Ward, a mail-order merchant who sued the city four times between eighteen ninety and nineteen ten to prevent buildings from going up on the lakefront. Ward won every suit. His principle — that the lakefront was 'forever open, clear and free' — was incorporated into Burnham's eighteen ninety-nine plan and is now embedded in the city's DNA.

Behind you is the skyline you have been moving through all day: the Wrigley Building's white glow, the Tribune Tower's Gothic crown, the green curve of three thirty-three West Wacker, the corncobs of Marina City, the Board of Trade's pyramid, the Bean's silver dome. The whole city is visible from here, laid out against the sky with Lake Michigan spreading east to the horizon.

This is where Chicago shows you its cards. The fire of eighteen seventy-one burned everything. The architects rebuilt with ideas. Louis Sullivan gave them a philosophy. Daniel Burnham gave them a plan. Bertrand Goldberg gave them curves. Anish Kapoor gave them a mirror. And the city, at every moment, refused to do anything small when something larger was available.

The lake is cold and flat and vast. The Blues and Jazz that grew from the Great Migration — when Black Americans came north from Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia to work in Chicago's factories — still play in clubs on the North Side and the South Side, the music that gave Chicago its soul while the architects were giving it its skyline. Stand here for a moment and let the wind off the lake hit you full in the face. That is Chicago saying hello.