Heart of Chicago Walking Tour: History, Art, and Architecture

Entries on This Tour

This bust commemorates Hall of Fame sportscaster Jack Brickhouse (1916-1998). A native of Peoria, Illinois, he announced Chicago Cubs baseball games on WGN radio and WGN-TV for more than forty years. Brickhouse also called games for the Chicago White Sox, Chicago Bears, Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team, and New York Giants baseball club during his career. Two years after retiring in 1981, he received the Ford C. Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and was inducted into the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association Hall of Fame. Following Brickhouse’s death in 1998, three admirers of his formed a group called Citizens United for Brickhouse Statue (CUBS) and began soliciting donations. Their fundraising campaign was a smashing success, hauling in roughly $400,000. Unveiled along Michigan Avenue near Tribune Tower in downtown Chicago in September 2000, the eight-foot-tall bronze bust depicts the longtime Chicago sports announcer sitting in a broadcast booth with one hand on a microphone and the other holding a program or spotter chart. Among those in attendance at the dedication ceremony were Chicago Cubs great Ernie Banks, the owner of the Chicago White Sox, Jerry Reinsdorf, and Illinois Governor George Ryan. With the bust costing only $150,000, CUBS decided to use the rest of the money to fund a fellowship for brain cancer research at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Brickhouse’s honor. Within a decade, the bust had fallen into disrepair and was removed for restoration and repairs in November 2009. The following month, it was reinstalled in its original location.

2. Founder of Chicago statue Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable

Fur trader Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable became the first non-Native American resident of the area that is now known as Chicago. DuSable was of African descent and came to the region from the French colony of Saint Domingue (After winning independence from France, the Saint Domingue became known as Haiti). History books have recognized DuSable as the first settler of non-European descent in the area, having established a fur-trading outpost in 1779 when the area was a largely uninhabited swamp. The state of Illinois officially recoginzed DuSable as "the father" of the city of Chicago in 1968. Decades later, Chicago's Haitian-American community raised funds and hired sculptor Erik Blome to create a statue to honor DuSable. The statue was dedicated in 2009 and is one of several landmarks in Chicago that honor the city's founder.

3. McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum

At the center of the new Chicago Riverwalk, The McCormick Bridgehouse and Chicago River Museum celebrates and honors “the Chicago River and its world-famous movable bridges.” At river level, visitors can see the city’s most famous movable bridges and then walk through 5 stories of exhibits that highlight the river and bridge.

4. Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF)

The Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) has offered educational programs and materials about the architecture of Chicago since its inception in 1966. The organization offers 85 tours and a variety of special programs, as well as a number of exhibits at its headquarters. The organization's most popular events are the daily river tours that allow visitors to learn about numerous buildings. These tours, like their exhibits and other programs, center, on architecture, engineering, and design. There are also a number of thematic bus tours as well as walking tours in several sections of the city.

5. Mather Tower

This slender skyscraper at East Wacker Drive was built between 1926 and 1928, as the headquarters of the Mather Stock Car Company. The Mather Tower was named for Alonzo C. Mather, a businessman and philanthropist who was born in New York in 1848. Mather became the founder of the Mather Stock Car Company, a leading manufacturer of railroad livestock cars designed to provide more humane shipment of animals. The tower, now known by its address, was Chicago's second tallest building (41 stories) when it was completed in 1928.

6. Heald Square Monument

A Chicago landmark, this eleven-foot-tall bronze sculpture was made by Lorado Taft and Leonard Crunelle and depicts George Washington, with Robert Morris and Haym Salomon during the events of the American Revolution.

7. Chicago's IBM Building (AMA Plaza and Langham Hotel)

The IBM Building, now known as 330 North Wabash, was erected in Chicago in 1972. The building was the last skyscraper designed by the distinguished Second School architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who died before its completion. The building serves as a monument to the dominance of IBM within the late twentieth-century business world. IBM, at the time of the building's design, employed more than 240,000 people and generated more than $6.8 billion in revenue. The building is now home to the headquarters of the American Medical Association and the Langham Hotel.

8. Marina City, Chicago

Situated just outside of Chicago’s Loop District on the north side of the river, Marina City, also known as the "Corn Cob Towers," has been one of the city’s most iconic landmarks since its completion in 1967. Noted for its unique nature-inspired curvilinear architecture and reinforced concrete construction, Marina City is the brainchild of the world-renowned modernist architect Bertrand Goldberg. Goldberg studied architecture at the Bauhaus in Germany and worked under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, known as one of the pioneers of modernist architecture. The idea behind Goldberg’s Marina City was to draw middle-class Chicagoans back into the city after twenty years of post-war suburban migration. Blending a unique architectural style with utility, Goldberg envisioned the complex to be a city within a city that combined residential, office, retail, and entertainment spaces. When completed the five-building Marina City complex offered Chicagoans two 65-story residential towers, a 10-story office building, a bowling alley, an ice rink, retail shopping space, a restaurant, a cinema, gym, and a small marina. Marina City remains a highly sought-after residential complex and became an official Chicago Landmark on March 16, 2016.

9. The S.S. Eastland Disaster Memorial

This plaque along the Chicago Riverwalk commemorates the 1915 Eastland Disaster, one of the most deadly maritime disasters of the 20th century. The capsizing of the S. S. Eastland led to the death of an estimated 848 passengers and crew and remains the largest loss of life from a single shipwreck on the Great Lakes. Most of the victims were factory workers and their children, and twenty-two entire families saw the loss of both parents and all of their children on that day. On the morning of July 24, 1915, four major passenger steamers ready to take over 7,000 passengers to the Western Electric Company’s company picnic across Lake Michigan in Michigan City, Indiana. On the Eastland, nearly 2,500 Western Electric employees, crew members, and employee family members were on board. Around 7:30 am that morning, while still docked in the Chicago River, the Eastland capsized. Out of the 2,500 passengers, 844 passengers and four crew members drowned. While the Eastland Disaster made headlines for a few days, media coverage soon focused on other events such as the marriage of a millionaire heiress in Michigan the following week. More passengers lost their lives in this disaster than the Titanic, although far more crew members lost their lives on the Titanic than the Eastland. That the Titanic tends to focus on the death of passengers while few people remember the Eastland demonstrates the tendency for tragedies involving non-elites and working-class victims to receive less media coverage. the story of the Eastland might have also ended in the wrongful arrest of crew members had it not been for the efforts of attorney Clarence Darrow who demonstrated the innocence of the chief engineer and other crew members.

10. Freeform by Richard Hunt

Freeform by Richard Hunt is an abstract sculpture that complements the exterior facade of the State of Illinois Building. It was commissioned in 1993 by the State of Illinois’s, Capital Development Board. The sculpture is made of stainless steel welded together and the dimensions are, H 26 ft. x W 35 ft. x D 2 ft. It may look small compared to the building but it is actually two and a half stories high and weighs three tons. The title of the sculpture derives from one of Hunt’s central ideas about the nature of Abstract Art, it is freely formed.

11. Cadillac Palace Theatre

The Cadillac Palace Theatre is a testament to the elegance and grandeur of old theaters and movie palaces. The interior, which was inspired by the Palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau, is filled with red carpeting, gilded walls, and six glittering chandeliers. The theatre first opened its doors in in 1926 as the home theater for a vaudeville group called the Orpheum Circuit. However, by the 1930s, vaudeville fell out of fashion and the theater transformed itself into a movie palace, then back into a performance stage by the 1950s, and serving as a concert venue and banquet hall during the 1970s. The Cadillac Palace Theatre was restored in 1999 and continues to offer Broadway style theatrical performances.

12. City Hall

Completed in 1911, Chicago City Hall was designed by the architectural firm Holabird & Roche. The building is home to the offices of the mayor, the city treasurer of Chicago, the City Clerk, some of the city’s departments, the wards of the various aldermen of Chicago, and the chambers of the Chicago City Council. It reaches 11 stories and was built in the classical revival style. The classical revival style, or neoclassicism, refers to Western movements in visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture at various points throughout history that were inspired by stylistic elements of Ancient Greek and Ancient Roman art.

13. Monument with Standing Beast

The Monument with Standing Beast in the heart of Chicago is only one of three sculptures by Jean Dubuffet in the United States. The sculpture is composed of four notable elements: a standing animal, a tree, a portal, and architectural form. With his sculpture, Dubuffet hoped to connect with the average person as the sculpture’s open plan allows viewers to walk through and under the sculpture. Monument with Standing Beast reflects Dubuffet’s “often brutal, urban style utilizing street language, graffiti and caricature.”

14. "The Picasso"

Nestled on the east side of the Daley Center, “The Picasso” is an untitled abstract sculpture dedicated to the city by Pablo Picasso. The sculpture, made of Cor-Ten steel, stands 50 feet tall and was commissioned in 1963 by the architects of the Richard J. Daley Center. Picasso worked on this sculpture for over 2 years, even creating a 42-inch model that can be seen today at the Art Institute of Chicago. The sculpture was unveiled in August 1967. In a letter to the city, Picasso wrote that he gave the sculpture as a gift to the city of Chicago, but never gave a description of the sculpture’s representation.

15. Miró's Chicago

Located in the Loop district of Chicago, this sculpture was designed by Joan Miró in 1979 and originally named The Sun, the Moon, and One Star. The Brunswick Corporation originally commissioned a sculpture from Miró in 1969. However, they decided not to go forward with the project due to the cost. The first female Mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, agreed to fund 50% of the project in 1979. Miró decided to donate his design to the city, thus making the cost more manageable. A number of organizations and individuals covered the other fifty percent. The sculpture was unveiled in 1981.

16. Reliance Building

The Reliance building was erected as one of the world's first steel-frame skyscrapers in 1895. Designed by the famous Burnham and Root architectural firm, the building was built in two stages because the tenants living on the top floors of the existing building at this location refused to leave until their lease expired. In response, the engineers used jack screws which held up the top floors while construction began on the lower floors. Construction began in 1891 and the building stood fourteen stories when it was completed. Until the Great Depression, doctors and other medical professionals leased offices in the building; afterwards, the Reliance Building began to fall into disrepair until the mid-1990s when a major renovation occurred. Today, the Reliance Building serves as a boutique hotel, the Alise Chicago

17. CIBC Theater (also known as the Majestic and Shubert Theatre)

The CIBC Theatre opened in 1906 under the name Majestic Theatre as Chicago's first $1 million venue and home to legendary vaudeville acts. The CIBC currently seats 1,800 and routinely presents Broadway shows, notably since a substantial renovation in 2006; its most recent claim to fame involves producing the smash hit, "Hamilton." The Majestic name comes from the twenty-one floor skyscraper for which it resides. When the building opened in 1905, it stood as the city's tallest building. Today, the CIBC and the Hampton Inn Majestic Hotel occupy the tower. Over the years, the theater has operated under several names such as the PrivateBank Theatre, Bank of America Theatre, LaSalle Bank Theatre, and, from 1945 - 2005, the Sam Shubert Theatre.

18. Palmer House Hilton

Originally known as “The Palmer,” the Palmer House Hilton Hotel has been one of the city's most important places for events and welcoming guests from the day the establishment opened its doors on September 26, 1871. The original Palmer hotel greeted only a few guests, however, as it was destroyed by fire 13 days later--one of hundreds of buildings destroyed by the Great Chicago Fire on October 9, 1871. The second Palmer House was completed in 1875. The third and final Palmer House was built between 1923 and 1925 and was acquired by Conrad Hilton in 1945. Thor Equities acquired the Palmer House Hilton in 2005 and announced its intention to sell the historic property in 2015.

19. Chapin and Gore Building

Completed in 1904, the Chapin and Gore Building was built for the locally famous whiskey-distilling duo of Gardner Spring Chapin and James Jefferson Gore, who gained fame due to a bold move made during the Great Chicago Fire. As well, the 1904 structure represents one of the few multi-story office buildings inspired by the Prairie School of architecture made famous by people such as Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright.

20. The Art Institute of Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago, established in 1879, is a world-renowned, encyclopedic art museum housing one of the world’s most important permanent collections. The Institute offers around thirty exhibitions a year and its permanent collection of over a quarter million works represents the third largest collection of art in the United States. The Institute is also home to the largest collection of impressionist paintings outside of Paris.

21. The Crown Fountain- Millennium Park

The Crown Fountain is a piece of public art located in Chicago's Millennium Park that opened in July 2004. It was built by Krueck and Sexton Architects and designed by Jaume Plensa, a Catalan artist. The fountain is a Black granite pool with a 50 ft. glass brick tower on either end. The towers display videos of various faces that interact with park goers by squirting water out of their mouths. The water features operate from May to October.

22. Cloud Gate, "The Bean"

Cloud Gate is British artist Anish Kapoor's first public outdoor work installed in the United States. Though commonly known throughout Chicago as “The Bean” because of its kidney-bean shape, Cloud Gate was so christened when it debuted in 2006, two years after installation began. Kapoor's 110-ton elliptical sculpture is forged of a seamless series of highly polished stainless steel plates, which reflect Chicago’s famous skyline and the clouds above. The reflections of the city and the people surrounding the sculpture are equally fascinating. The Bean grew rapidly into one of Chicago’s major landmarks, up there with the Hancock Tower, the Chicago River, the Willis Tower, Navy Pier, and Wrigley Field. In fact, it is Chicago’s No. 2 tourist attraction, thanks in part to its reflective surface that simplifies selfie photographs. The sculpture is a major feature in the city’s Millennium Park and stands next to Jaume Plensa's Crown Foundation (installed in 2004), another favorite for its constant monumental video feed.

23. Chicago Cultural Center

Famous for its two stained glass domes, the Chicago Cultural Center is an architectural beauty that offers free music, dance, theater events, as well as films, lectures, art exhibitions, and family events/programs for the City of Chicago. These events honor international, national, regional, and local arts, musicians, and performers. The Chicago Cultural Center was designed by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge and built in 1897 to serve as the city’s first central library. The building was deemed a national historic place in 1972 and a Chicago landmark in 1976. In 1991, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs designated the library to become the Chicago Cultural Center.

24. James M. Nederlander Theatre

The James M. Nederlander Theatre originally opened as the Oriental Theatre in 1926. Owned by Balaban and Katz, the theatre was one of Chicago’s grand movie palaces of the Roaring ‘20s. It was designed by Rapp and Rapp, an architectural firm known for outlandish, almost gaudy designs; the interior was inspired by an East Asian theme, with mosaics, exotic animals, and golden figures. The Oriental Theatre showed movies and hosted live performances until it closed in 1981. The building remained largely vacant for several years, finally undergoing an extensive renovation project in the mid-1990s. The theatre reopened in 1998 as the Ford Center for Performing Arts. In 2019, it was renamed the James M. Nederlander Theatre.

25. Oliver Building (now part of the James M. Nederlander Theatre)

The Oliver Building enjoys its own historical distinction as the home to the Oliver Typewriter Company, which profoundly transformed the typewriting industry. However, in 1997, The Oriental Theater (now known as the James M. Nederlander Theatre) gutted the Oliver Building and connected the its theater to it for the purposes of using it as its backstage area. The only remaining feature of the Oliver Building is its front facade, which still displays the Oliver Typewriter Company name.

26. Goodman Theatre

The Goodman Theater operates as Chicago's oldest not for profit theater company. Since 2000, its home has been located within the heart of Chicago's theater district. However, its history dates back to 1922 when it opened in the back of the Art Institute. The history of the theater involves a mix of professional, student, or combined student and professional productions. The Goodman won a Regional Theatre Tony Award in 1992, one of five Chicago-based companies to win the award, giving Chicago the most Tony awards for the Regional Theatre category. The current DePaul University School of Drama owes its history to the Goodman School created in 1922, which served as an integral part of the Goodman until the 1970s and still enjoys a connection.

27. Chicago Theatre

The Chicago Theatre is one of the city’s most iconic landmarks and provides the “unofficial” emblem of the city. Designed by Rapp and Rapp in their famous Neo-Baroque French Revival style, the theatre served as the flagship for the Balaban and Katz theatre group. The famous marquee is one of the most famous and recognized in the world. Meticulously designed with every emphasis placed on luxury, for the next 40 years, the Chicago Theatre served as the premier entertainment venue for the city. As with most historic theatres, the rise of duplex theatres during the 1970s and 1980s resulted in the decline of the Chicago Theatre. In the mid-80s, the Chicago Theatre Restoration Associates purchased and commenced a multi-million dollar renovation on the building, reopening the venue on September 10, 1986. The Chicago Theatre was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 6, 1979 and designated as a Chicago Landmark on January 28, 1983.

28. Page Brothers Building

The Page Brothers Building in Chicago represents a transition for Chicago, both in its local history and architectural history. Erected in 1872 as the first commercial construction after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the building features a cast-iron facade facing Lake Street and stands as the oldest remaining structure of its kind in the city. Not long afterwards, State Street supplanted Lake Street - even growing to become one of Chicago's most noteworthy locations. As well, the Chicago School of Architecture grew famous for no-longer building small five-story cast-iron buildings, but instead pushed the envelope and usher in the age of the skyscraper. The Page Brothers Building was added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 5, 1975 and designated a Chicago Landmark on January 28, 1983.

This Tour is a Walking Tour.

Heart of Chicago Walking Tour: History, Art, and Architecture

Created by Mathew Powers on November 28th 2016, 9:43:25 pm.

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Description

This brief walking tour starts with the statue of city "founder" Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable and proceeds south to Millennium Park, with stops at some of the city's iconic buildings, monuments, and statues. Tour highlights include the Chicago River Museum, the Eastland Disaster, the Chicago Cultural Center, and sculpture by Picasso and iconic works such as The Cloud Gate, known affectionately to locals and tourists as "The Bean." The tour also includes the historic Palmer House and the world-renowned Art Institute of Chicago.

Entries on This Tour

Heart of Chicago Walking Tour: History, Art, and Architecture

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