Explore Chicago

The Chicago Cultural Center is a neoclassical building of 1897 on Michigan Avenue, built as the city's first central library and a Civil War memorial hall. Run by the city since 1978 as an arts centre, it holds exhibitions, concerts and talks, and visitors see Preston Bradley Hall with its Tiffany glass dome and the G.A.R. Hall and Rotunda.

The Medieval Torture Museum is a private museum on State Street in the Loop, housed in the Page Brothers Building of 1872. In about 6,000 square feet of dimly lit rooms it shows more than 100 torture and punishment devices from medieval and early modern Europe, with interactive displays explaining how they were used.

The Art Institute of Chicago is an art museum in Grant Park, founded in 1879; its Beaux-Arts building, guarded by two bronze lions, opened on Michigan Avenue in 1893. Renzo Piano's Modern Wing was added in 2009. The collection spans five millennia and includes Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, Wood's American Gothic and Hopper's Nighthawks.

Millennium Park is a park in the Loop, in the north-west corner of Grant Park, opened in 2004 on top of former rail yards and parking garages. It contains the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, an open-air concert stage designed by Frank Gehry, the BP Bridge, the Lurie Garden, the Crown Fountain and Anish Kapoor's sculpture Cloud Gate.

Willis Tower is a 110-storey skyscraper in the Chicago Loop, completed in 1973 as the Sears Tower to a design by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Its observation deck, Skydeck Chicago, is on the 103rd floor, some 412 metres up. Glass boxes called The Ledge project from the facade, so visitors can stand above the street below.

The Chicago Riverwalk is a public promenade about 2 km long on the south bank of the main branch of the Chicago River, running from Lake Street to Lake Michigan. Built in stages from 2001, it passes under the downtown bridges and has terraces, a Vietnam veterans memorial plaza, cafés, boat landings and kayak rental.

Chicago Children's Museum is a hands-on museum for young children, founded in 1982 and housed at Navy Pier since 1995. Its three floors of exhibits let children dig for dinosaur bones, build with tools in a tinkering lab, play with water and climb a rope schooner, always accompanied by an adult.

The Field Museum of Natural History grew out of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and moved in 1921 into its neoclassical marble building on Chicago's Museum Campus by Lake Michigan. Its halls cover dinosaurs, ancient Egypt, gems and cultures of the world. SUE, one of the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons found, is on display.

The Adler Planetarium on the Museum Campus opened in 1930 as the first planetarium in the United States, founded by the businessman Max Adler. Its twelve-sided Art Deco building by Ernest Grunsfeld Jr. holds dome theatres with sky shows and exhibitions on astronomy, space flight and historic scientific instruments.

Navy Pier is a pier about a kilometre long on Lake Michigan, opened in 1916 as Chicago's Municipal Pier and renamed in 1927 to honour Navy veterans of the First World War. It holds shops, restaurants, a theatre, a children's museum and boat departures. The Centennial Wheel, opened in 2016, carries enclosed gondolas almost 60 metres high.

Lincoln Park Zoo, founded in 1868, lies in Lincoln Park on the lakefront about 4 km north of the Loop and is one of the oldest zoos in North America. On about 14 hectares it keeps animals of some 200 species, among them gorillas, lions, polar bears and penguins, and it includes the Farm-in-the-Zoo.

The Robie House is a Prairie-style house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1910 for the manufacturer Frederick C. Robie, on the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. Its long brick walls, bands of art glass windows and cantilevered roofs stress the horizontal. It is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is seen on guided tours of the interior.

The Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, called the Museum of Science and Industry until 2024, occupies the Palace of Fine Arts of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park. Opened in 1933, it shows the German submarine U-505, the Pioneer Zephyr train, a replica coal mine, the Apollo 8 command module and a large model railway.

The Frank Lloyd Wright Home and Studio is in Oak Park, a village bordering Chicago's west side. Wright built the shingled house in 1889 and added the studio in 1898, where he and his associates developed the Prairie style; he lived here with his family until 1909. Restored to its 1909 appearance, it is seen on guided tours of the interior.