When the Adler Planetarium opened on the lakefront in May 1930, it became the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, bringing a German-built Zeiss projector and the night sky indoors to American audiences for the first time. The institution was funded by Max Adler, a Sears executive who stepped back from business to support astronomy education, and it opened to the public on his birthday. Its twelve-sided, rainbow-granite building, designed by Ernest Grunsfeld Jr., won an architectural med.....

The first museum in the country devoted entirely to American authors opened on North Michigan Avenue in May 2017, the product of nearly a decade of planning by founder Malcolm O'Hagan, an engineer who had admired a similar museum in Dublin and wondered why the United States had none of its own. It sits on the second floor of a building overlooking the Loop, a short walk from Millennium Park, and treats writing in the broadest sense: poetry and fiction alongside speeches, song lyrics, journalism .....

Chicago's convention-hall theatre has outlived a fire and six decades of fashion. The Arie Crown Theater opened in February 1961 as the 5,086-seat Big Theater of the brand-new McCormick Place, staging twice-daily shows for the Chicago Auto Show; that June the trustees named it for Arie Crown, the Lithuanian immigrant merchant and philanthropist whose family fund - led by his son, industrialist Henry Crown - had underwritten the hall. The catastrophic McCormick Place fire of January 1967 closed .....

Set at the centre of Grant Park, Buckingham Fountain has been one of Chicago's signature landmarks since its dedication in August 1927. Built in an ornate, rococo wedding-cake style and inspired by the Latona Fountain at the Palace of Versailles, it was designed by the architect Edward H. Bennett, a key figure behind the 1909 Plan of Chicago, with sculpture by the Frenchman Marcel Loyau. The fountain was a gift to the city from the philanthropist Kate Sturges Buckingham, who funded it in memory.....

Versailles came to the Loop in 1926, survived vaudeville's death, Cinerama, a banquet-hall conversion and heavy metal, and emerged gilded again. The Cadillac Palace Theatre at 151 West Randolph Street opened on 4 October 1926 as the New Palace Theatre, the Chicago flagship of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, designed by the legendary theatre architects Rapp and Rapp in a French Renaissance style inspired by the palaces of Versailles and Fontainebleau, its lobby lined with marble, gold leaf and br.....

Inside Chicago's biggest warehouse-rave venue hides a second room with its own front door. Cermak Hall is the 10,000-square-foot multi-purpose hall within Radius Chicago, the 55,000-square-foot converted steel factory at 640 West Cermak Road in East Pilsen, on the border of Chinatown just south of the Loop with direct access off I-90/94. Radius opened on 29 February 2020 - a grand-opening weekend headlined by Dillon Francis and Party Favor, weeks before the pandemic shutdown - and Cermak Hall's .....

Overlooking the Chicago River where Michigan Avenue meets Wacker Drive, the Chicago Architecture Center is a museum and tour hub devoted to the buildings of a city famous for them. It opened on this riverfront site, inside a Mies van der Rohe-designed tower, in August 2018, the latest home for an organisation that began in 1966 as the Chicago Architecture Foundation, formed by volunteers trying to save a historic Prairie Avenue mansion from demolition. The centrepiece of its galleries is the Ch.....

View art exhibits and attend live performances

A pedestrian promenade tracing the south bank of the Chicago River through the heart of downtown, the Chicago Riverwalk has transformed the city's waterfront into one of its most enjoyable public spaces. Running for more than a mile from the lakefront into the Loop, the landscaped walkway links a series of distinct waterside rooms lined with restaurants, bars, kayak launches and gathering spots beneath the city's celebrated bridges and towers. The riverwalk was developed in phases over many yea.....

Daniel Burnham designed it for free, and one of the world's great orchestras has played it for more than a century. Symphony Center at 220 South Michigan Avenue in the Chicago Loop is the home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, anchored by Orchestra Hall, which opened on 14 December 1904 with founder Theodore Thomas conducting the dedicatory concert. Thomas had campaigned for years to move his orchestra out of the cavernous Auditorium Theatre; CSO trustee Burnham - the architect-planner of the W.....