Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:30:00

Chicago's newest arena was designed to be an urban room in the tradition of the Auditorium Theatre - a civic hall that happens to have a basketball court in it. Wintrust Arena, at 200 East Cermak Road on the McCormick Place campus in the Near South Side, opened on October 14, 2017 under a sweeping curved roof with four transparent glass sides. The 10,387-seat venue came out of a $173 million public-private partnership between DePaul University and the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, with a groundbreaking in November 2015 that also launched the 40-story Marriott Marquis hotel across the street. Pelli Clarke Pelli designed the building with Moody Nolan as architect of record and AECOM handling the sports architecture; the bowl wraps a lower and upper level around the floor with more than 400 club seats and 22 suites. The anchor tenants are DePaul's men's and women's basketball programs, which moved back near campus after decades at suburban Allstate Arena, and since 2018 the WNBA's Chicago Sky, who brought the franchise's first championship banner home to the building in 2021. The arena doubles as an events centre for McCormick Place, and its first months set that tone - REO Speedwagon for a hardware convention, Bob Dylan with Mavis Staples, and the inaugural Obama Foundation Summit with Chance the Rapper and Lin-Manuel Miranda all inside the first weeks. Operation passed to Oak View Group, and the calendar now mixes college and professional basketball with concerts, MMA cards, graduations and convention keynotes - the flexible mid-size bowl Chicago's South Loop had never had. The location does quiet economic work too, three L stops from DePaul's Loop campus and stitched into the McCormick Square entertainment district the arena was built to activate - a convention corridor learning to be a neighborhood.