Go inside this building. Seriously. Stop the tour, go inside, and look up. It's free. What you're going to see is the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world — 38 feet in diameter, made of 30,000 pieces of glass — and somehow almost no one knows it exists.
This building opened in 1897 as the Chicago Public Library. The same architects who designed the Art Institute — Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge — designed this. The city wanted the library to be a "palace of knowledge." They succeeded. There's marble from Italy, mosaics from Venice, mother-of-pearl inlays, and not one but TWO massive stained glass domes — a Tiffany dome in the Preston Bradley Hall and a Healy and Millet dome in the Grand Army of the Republic Hall.
The Tiffany dome alone is worth more than most buildings. It's valued at over $35 million. And you can just... walk in. For free. Any time they're open.
Here's the absurd part — for decades, the dome was covered with a false ceiling. Hidden. Employees would work beneath it
for years without knowing it was there. It wasn't fully restored and revealed until the 1970s. Someone looked up during renovations and essentially said — "uh, there's a $35 million Tiffany dome up here."
The building is now the Chicago Cultural Center — free exhibitions, concerts, events. The ornate reading rooms that used to hold card catalogs now hold art installations. It's one of the most be
