Behind the butcher counter of a century-old former auto body shop, the 1st Ward is a 5,000-square-foot concert and event space tucked inside the Chop Shop complex at 2033 West North Avenue in Chicago's Wicker Park neighbourhood. The building sits just west of the Milwaukee-Damen-North intersection, one of the city's busiest nightlife crossroads, and brings together encased meats, craft beer, cocktails, and live entertainment under a single roof. Designed by event professionals, the venue holds .....

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 .....

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 .....

A parish built it; Chicago theatre never gave it back. The Athenaeum at 2936 North Southport Avenue in Lakeview opened in 1911, designed by architect Hermann J. Gaul for the Redemptorist Fathers of St. Alphonsus as a home for the intellectual, physical and social intercourse of their German-Catholic parishioners - opera, dance, orchestral and dramatic productions from day one. More than a century later it is Chicago's oldest continuously operating Off-Loop theatre, now run as the Athenaeum Cente.....

The butcher shop in the back became one of Chicago's hardest-working stages. Beat Kitchen at 2100 West Belmont Avenue has anchored the Roscoe Village corner of Belmont and Hoyne since 1990, serving live music, food and beer out of an 1889 building whose back room spent its first century as the neighbourhood butcher's before conversion into the venue's music room. Owner Robert Gomez - whose portfolio also includes Wicker Park's Subterranean - has kept the formula steady for three decades: a prope.....

Chicago's transit authority demolished this club, and it came back bigger. Bottom Lounge began life in 1991 as Lakeview Links, a sports bar with cover bands at 3206 North Wilton in Lake View; when owners learned around 2001 that the CTA had targeted the property under eminent domain for the Brown Line extension, they adopted the Bottom Lounge name and started booking original music as a supposed last hurrah. The reprieve lasted years - four consecutive New Year's Eves were billed as the final ni.....

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.....

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.....

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.....