Landmarks in Chicago
40 landmarks to discover with Bad Historian in Chicago.
Adler Planetarium
First planetarium in the Americas. Best skyline view in Chicago.
Art Institute Lions
The iconic lions that get dressed up when Chicago wins championships.
Chicago Cultural Center
A hidden $35 million Tiffany dome that nobody knew existed for decades.
Couch Tomb
A tomb in a public park. And it's not empty.
Field Museum
Built on garbage. Filled with dinosaurs. Welcome to the Field Museum.
Lincoln Park Conservatory
Therapy with ferns. A Victorian glass house in Chicago.
Shedd Aquarium
They built a train to haul seawater from Florida. For the fish.
Standing Lincoln
The greatest Lincoln sculpture ever made — by a sculptor who basically traced.
The Biograph Theater
Where John Dillinger watched his last movie before being gunned down by the FBI.
The Chicago Theatre
Neutral ground during Prohibition—where rival gangsters watched the same shows.
The Green Mill Cocktail Lounge
A real 1920s speakeasy where you can sit in Al Capone's actual booth.
Water Tower
The tiny Gothic castle that survived while all of Chicago burned around it.
Adler Planetarium — The First Sky in the Hemisphere
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.
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.
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.
Chicago Water Tower
That yellow stone castle marooned in the middle of Michigan Avenue is the Chicago Water Tower, and it is the most overqualified piece of plumbing in North America. Turrets. Battlements. Little pointed towers at every corner.
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.
Marina City
Your brain has already made the corn joke. Everybody's does. Those two round concrete towers standing in the river are Marina City, the architect was Bertrand Goldberg, and he went to his grave insisting the shape was FLOWER PETALS.
Merchandise Mart
The Kennedy family's best investment—$12.5M in, $625M out.
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.
Riverwalk — Big Flush
You're standing next to a river that flows the wrong direction.
Riverwalk — Modern
For most of Chicago's history, this river was a dumpster.
Shedd Aquarium — They Shipped the Ocean
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.
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 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 Theatre
That six-story vertical sign spelling out the city's name is probably the single most photographed object in Chicago.
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.
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 Palmer House Hotel
The Palmer House. There has been a hotel on this spot since eighteen seventy-one, which makes it the longest continuously operating hotel in the country — with an asterisk.
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 Wrigley Building
The white one is the Wrigley Building, and the white is doing a job. That skin is more than two hundred and fifty thousand individual pieces of glazed terra cotta, and they are not all the same color.
Tribune Tower
Get close to the base of the Tribune Tower and start reading the little brass labels. Because set into the limestone wall, at hand height, are fragments of other people's buildings. The Parthenon. The Great Wall of China.
Wrigley Building
The gum magnate's glowing white tower—designed so you'd think about chewing.
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 Postcard Tour
Chicago's greatest hits — and the stories behind them. A river that flows backward, buildings covered in stolen rocks, towers that look like corn cobs, and a giant bean made by a man who wishes you'd stop calling it a bean.
Hear the stories behind these places
Download the app for audio-guided experiences of Chicago's landmarks.
Get the App