Things to do
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Art Institute
Two bronze lions guard the Michigan Avenue steps of a collection that owns Hopper's Nighthawks, Wood's American Gothic and Seurat's Grande Jatte, along with an Impressionist holding bought by Chicago money in the eighteen nineties. Piano's Modern Wing at the back opens onto a bridge across to Millennium Park. Thorne's miniature rooms downstairs repay the detour. Allow half a day, and longer if the Modern Wing is on the list.
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Chicago Riverwalk
Stairs drop from the bridges on Michigan and Wabash to a walkway along the south bank of the main branch, one level below the traffic. Bars, kayak hire and boat docks fill the coves between bridges, and the architecture cruises leave from here. The canyon of towers reads better from the water than from the pavement above. It wakes in spring and shuts down in the cold.
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Field Museum
Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus yet found, stands upstairs in a hall of her own, the skull shown separately because it is too heavy for the mount. A titanosaur cast fills the ground floor. Egyptian rooms rebuild a mastaba tomb over two levels. The museum came out of the world's fair of eighteen ninety-three and shares a lakefront campus with the aquarium and the planetarium.
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Millennium Park
Kapoor's polished steel bean sits on a plaza built over railway tracks, reflecting the skyline in a curve that visitors photograph from underneath. Crown Fountain faces spit water at children through the warm months. Gehry's ribbon of steel shelters a stage with free concerts in summer, and the Lurie Garden behind it plants prairie species. Early morning is the hour to find the bean clear.
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Navy Pier
A kilometre of pier runs out into the lake from Streeterville, built for freight and the navy and long since turned over to fairground and theatre. The wheel at the end climbs to sixty metres and gives the skyline from the water. Boats leave the south dock for architecture cruises. Fireworks go up on summer nights. It is frankly touristic and the view is the excuse.
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Willis Tower Skydeck
Glass boxes cantilever out from the hundred and third floor with nothing underfoot, and they are the reason for the queue, which runs long at weekends and in the hour before sunset. Built as the Sears Tower in the nineteen seventies, the black tube frame held the height record in the west for a generation. Clear days show four states from the deck.
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Lincoln Park Zoo
Free to enter and open every day of the year, the zoo has sat in its park on the North Side since 1868. Gorillas and chimpanzees hold the grandest of the houses, and a boardwalk loops a pond where the skyline stands behind the herons. A conservatory of palms adjoins. Two hours suffices, and mornings are the calm hours.
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Wrigley Field
Ivy grows on the outfield brick, planted in the nineteen thirties and bare until it leafs in late spring. The scoreboard is still turned by hand, and a flag raised after the last out tells the neighbourhood who won. Rooftops on Waveland and Sheffield sell seats overlooking the field. Tours run out of season. Trains on the red line stop a block from the gates.