Parks in Chicago
8 parks to discover with Bad Historian in Chicago.
Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool
A hidden prairie in the middle of a city of three million people.
Cloud Gate (The Bean)
The Bean. The artist hates that you call it that. Keep calling it that.
Crown Fountain
Giant faces that spit water at you. This is public art.
Lincoln Park Zoo
One of the last free zoos in America. Started with two swans.
Nature Boardwalk
You're walking on milk jugs. The skyline view is the money shot.
Cloud Gate, Millennium Park
You already know it's a bean. Everybody knows it's a bean. Its name is Cloud Gate, the sculptor is Anish Kapoor, and he has spent roughly twenty years being quietly furious that the city looked at his masterwork and named it after a…
Grant Park — The Fight to Keep It Empty
Turn back toward the skyline and notice what's missing. There's a solid wall of towers along Michigan Avenue, and then, between that wall and the water, a long green nothing.
Northerly Island
Made from garbage. Destroyed by bulldozers at midnight. Now a nature sanctuary.
Chicago Audio Experiences
Visit these parks 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
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