Perched on the 94th floor of the tower at 875 North Michigan Avenue, the observation deck branded today as 360 CHICAGO ranks among the highest public viewpoints in the city. The skyscraper opened in 1969 as the John Hancock Center, and an observatory has occupied its upper floors almost from the beginning, carrying sightseers roughly 1,000 feet skyward in about 39 seconds aboard some of the fastest elevators in the country. A multi-million-dollar renovation in 2014 retired the old name, introduc.....

Instantly recognisable for the giant X-shaped braces running up its sides, the 100-storey tower at 875 North Michigan Avenue has anchored the Chicago skyline since 1969. It was conceived as the John Hancock Center, financed by the insurance company whose name it carried for half a century, and designed by architect Bruce Graham with structural engineer Fazlur Rahman Khan of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. Their exterior braced-tube system let the building rise without a forest of interior columns .....

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 .....

The Magnificent Mile's only theatre has been movie house, art cinema and Broadway stage - twice. The Broadway Playhouse at Water Tower Place, at 175 East Chestnut Street just off Michigan Avenue, opened in 1976 as the Drury Lane Theatre Water Tower Place, part of the pioneering vertical mall's original tenant mix. Live theatre lasted until 1983, when the space converted to cinemas that cycled through Plitt, Cineplex Odeon, Meridian and finally Village Theatres' art-house programming before going.....

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.....