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. They stand for Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan and Indiana — the four states that touch Lake Michigan — and they're arranged around the basin leaning in toward the middle. The fountain is the lake. The states are the animals crowding around it. Somebody built a civics diagram out of bronze and then hid it in plain sight for a hundred years, and most people photographing it think they're looking at horses.
The design came from the Latona Fountain at Versailles, which was built for Louis the Fourteenth. Architect Edward Bennett studied the French king's fountain, came home, and built one roughly twice the size. That is the entire personality of this city rendered in stone.
The numbers are silly. One and a half million gallons of water. One hundred and ninety-three jets.
Fourteen thousand gallons a minute moving through the plumbing. Once an hour the fountain goes to full power and the center jet climbs one hundred and fifty feet straight up, which is roughly a fifteen-story building made of water. Then it settles back down and behaves itself for another hour.
All of it exists because of one woman. Kate Sturges Buckingham gave the fountain to Chicago in nineteen
