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Sears Tower
Sears Tower was the world's tallest building from 1973 to 2004.* Preceded by World Trade Center Surpassed by Taipei 101 Information Location Chicago, Illinois USA Status Complete Constructed 1970-1973 Height Antenna/Spire 1730 ft (527.3 m) Roof 1451 ft (442.3 m) Top floor 1354 ft (412.7 m) Technical Details Floor count 110 Floor area 3.8 million sq. ft. 418,064 sq. m Elevator count 104 Companies Architect Skidmore, Owings and Merrill * Fully habitable, self-supported, from main entrance to rooftop; see world's tallest structures for other listings.Itineraries
- - one day and night in Chicago, with skyscrapers, shopping, food, parks, and amazing views of the city from high and low.
Museums
Chicago's set of museums and cultural institutions are among the best in the world. Three of them are located within a short walk of each other in the , on what is known as the museum campus, in a beautiful spot along the lake: the Adler Planetarium, with all sorts of cool hands-on space exhibits and astronomy shows; the Field Museum, which features "Sue", the giant Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton, and a plethora of Egyptian treasures; and the Shedd Aquarium, with dolphins, whales, sharks, and the best collection of marine life east of California. A short distance away, on the , is the most fun of them all, the Museum of Science and Industry — or, as generations of Chicago-area grade school students know it, the best field trip ever.
In the , the Art Institute of Chicago has a handful of iconic household names among an unrivaled collection of Impressionism, modern and classical art, and tons of historical artifacts. And in , a short trip from the Loop, the cheerful (and free) Lincoln Park Zoo welcomes visitors every day of the week, with highlights including the brand-new Great Ape House.
Those are the most famous ones, but there are smaller museums throughout the city serving specific interests. The University of Chicago, in , has several cool (and free) museums that are open to all visitors. The Museum of Photography in the and the Museum of Contemporary Art in the also have enthusiastic fans.
See the sections on and for directions to districts with museums covering those topics as well.
Discount packages like the CityPass and the Go Chicago Card can be purchased before you arrive in town. They cover admission to some museums and other tourist attractions, allowing you to cut to the front of lines, and may include discounts for restaurants and shopping.
Architecture
From the sternly classical to the space-age, from the Gothic to the coolly modern, Chicago is a place with an embarrassment of architectural riches, where the past meets the future. Modern architecture was born here. Frank Lloyd Wright fans will swoon to see his earliest buildings in Chicago, where he began his professional career and established the Prairie School architectural style, with numerous homes in , , and the —over 100 buildings in the Chicago metropolitan area! He learned his craft at the foot of the , Louis Sullivan, whose ornate, awe-inspiring designs were once the jewels of the , and whose few surviving buildings (Auditorium Theater, Carson Pirie Scott Building, one in the ) still stand apart.
The 1871 Chicago Fire forced the city to rebuild, and the ingenuity and ambition of Sullivan, his teacher William Le Baron Jenney (Manhattan Building), and his contemporaries like Burnham & Root (Monadnock, Rookery) and Holabird & Roche/Root (Chicago Board of Trade) made Chicago the definitive city of their era. The world's first skyscrapers were built in the as those architects received ever more demanding commissions. Later, Mies van der Rohe would adapt Sullivan's ethos with landmark buildings on the (Illinois Institute of Technology) and the (Chicago Federal Center). Unfortunately, Chicago's world-class architectural heritage is almost evenly matched by the world-class recklessness with which the city has treated it, and the list is long of masterpieces that have been needlessly demolished for bland new structures; be warned that as many sorrows as glories await the budding Chicago architectural geek.
Architectural tours cover the landmarks on foot and by popular river boat tours, or by just standing awestruck on a downtown bridge over the Chicago River; see individual district articles for details. For a tour on the cheap, the short trip around the elevated Loop train circuit (Brown/Purple Lines) may be worth every penny of the $2 fare.
Chicago is also the birthplace of the skyscraper. It was here that steel-frame construction was invented, allowing buildings to rise above the limits of load-bearing walls. Naturally, competition with New York was fierce, but in the end, Chicago built them taller. Chicago boasts three out of America's tallest five buildings: the (1st), the Aon Center (3rd), and the (4th). For years, the Sears Tower was the tallest building in the world, but it's since lost the title by most measurements. Various developers insist they're bringing the title back. Until they do, though, the Sears Tower will have to settle for being the tallest building in , although the Hancock is not much shorter, is better located for tourists, has a better view, and is quite frankly better-looking.
African-American history
Chicago's African-American history begins with the city's African-American founder, Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable. Born to a Haitian slave and a French pirate, he married a woman from the Potawatomi tribe, and built a house and trading post on the Chicago River on the spot of today's Pioneer Court (the square just south of the Tribune Tower in the ). He lived on the Chicago River with his family from the 1770s to 1800, when he sold his house to John Kinzie, whose family and friends would later claim to have founded the city.
Relative to other northern cities, African-Americans constituted a fairly large part of Chicago's early population because of Illinois' more tolerant culture, which was inherited from fervent anti-slavery Mormon settlers. As a non-slave state generally lacking official segregation laws, Illinois was an attractive place to live for black freedmen and fugitive slaves.
By the 1920s, Chicago had a thriving middle class African-American community based in the neighborhood, which at the time became known as "The Black Metropolis," home of a cultural renaissance comparable to the better-known Harlem Renaissance of . African-American literature of the time was represented by local poetess Gwendolyn Brooks and novelist Richard Wright, most famous for his , nearly all of which takes place in Chicago's and . The Chicago school of African-American literature distinguished itself from the East Coast by its focus on the new realities of urban African-American life. Chicago became a center of African-American jazz, and center for the blues. Jazz great Louis Armstrong got his start there; other famous black Chicagoans of the day included Bessie Coleman—the world's first licensed black pilot, the hugely influential African-American and women's civil rights activist Ida B. Wells, the great pitcher/manager/executive of Negro League Baseball Andrew "Rube" Foster, and many more.
Both fueling and threatening Chicago's black renaissance was the single most influential part of Chicago's African-American history: the Great Migration. African-Americans from the rural moved to the industrial cities of the North due to the post-WWI shortage of immigrant industrial labor, and to escape the Jim Crow Laws and racial violence of the South. The massive wave of migrants, most from , increased Chicago's black population by more than 500,000. With it came southern food, Mississippi blues, and the challenges of establishing adequate housing for so many recent arrivals—a challenge that they would have to meet themselves, without help from a racist and neglectful city government.
Black Chicago's renaissance was brought to its knees by the Great Depression; its fate was sealed ironically by the 1937 creation of the Chicago Housing Authority, which sought to build affordable public housing for the city. However well-intentioned the project may have sounded, the results were disastrous. The largest housing projects by far were the 1940 Ida B. Wells projects, which were designed to "warehouse" Chicago's population of poor African-Americans in a district far away from white population centers, the Cabrini Green projects on the , which developed a reputation as the worst and most violent housing projects in the nation, and the massive 1962 Robert Taylor Homes in Bronzeville, which were forced to house an additional 16,000 people beyond their intended 11,000 capacity. The Black Metropolis proved unable to cope with this massive influx of new, impoverished residents, and the urban blight that came from concentrating such a great number of them in one place.
Further damaging to Chicago's black population was the phenomenon of "white flight" that accompanied the introduction of African-Americans to Chicago neighborhoods. Unwilling to live beside African Americans, many Chicagoans fled desegregation to the suburbs. This trend was accelerated by the practice of "blockbusting," where unsavory real estate agents would fan racist fears in order to buy homes on the cheap. As a result, Chicago neighborhoods (with the notable exceptions of and ) never truly integrated, and the social, educational, and economic networks that moving African-Americans hoped to join disintegrated in the wake of fleeing white communities. During this period, Chicago experienced a huge population loss and large sections of the city were covered with vacant lots, which in turn created the conditions for crime to flourish. A number of Chicago's major roads, most notably the Dan Ryan expressway, were built in part to segregate these areas from more prosperous ones like the .
In 1966, after a series of successes for the civil rights movement, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. decided to come north and chose Chicago as his first destination. However, from the moment of his arrival on the , King was utterly confounded. The savage attacks and death threats that followed his march through Marquette Park were challenge enough, but nowhere in the South was there a more expert player of politics than Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley. Expecting resistance, King instead met with press conferences; Daley made sure that the national media saw him publicly pledging his cooperation, which took the form of endless meetings and bureaucratic maneuvers that ensured nothing actually got done. King left town frustrated and exhausted, but Rev. Jesse Jackson continued civil rights efforts in Chicago through his Operation PUSH, which became a major force in Chicago and national politics. The 1983 election of Mayor Harold Washington, the first black mayor of Chicago, was a watershed event for Chicago's African-American population, and although long battles with obstructionist white politicians lay ahead, it marked the moment when African-American elected officials ceased to be rubber-stamps for the policies of figures like the first Mayor Daley, and became major, independent forces in their own right.
Today, with a plurality of nearly 40%, Chicago's black population is the country's second largest, after New York. African-American neighborhoods dominate the South Side, the , the , and the . Chicagoans ignorant of these areas may tell you that they are dangerous and crime-ridden, but the reality is much more complex. There are strong, middle and upper class black communities throughout the city, some of the more prominent of which include , , and Chatham, Calumet Heights, and South Shore in the .
is place to go for African-American history, although Kenwood also boasts interesting recent history, as it has been (or is) home to championship boxer Muhammad Ali, Nation of Islam leaders Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, and current Senator and US presidential candidate Barack Obama. No one should miss the DuSable Museum of African-American History in , the first museum of African-American history in the United States.
Ethnic neighborhoods
Chicago is a city of immigrants, and many neighborhoods still reflect the character and culture of the people who established them. Some, however, do more than just reflect: they you in a place that, for several blocks at a time, may as well be a chunk of another country, picked up and dropped near the shores of Lake Michigan. The best of Chicago's ethnic neighborhoods are completely uncompromised, and that makes them a real highlight for visitors.
is among the most active Chinatowns in the world. It even has its own stop on the CTA Red Line. It's on the South Side near , birthplace of the Irish political power-brokers who have run Chicago government for most of the last century. More Irish communities exist on the , where they even have an Irish castle to seal the deal. The is home to Archer Heights, a Lithuanian neighborhood.
The has the widest variety of immigrant groups in Chicago, many of whom established neighborhoods that reveal their native culture in both subtle and vibrant ways. No Chicago gourmand would eat Indian food that didn't come from a restaurant on Devon Avenue in Rogers Park. It's paradise for spices, saris, and the latest Bollywood flicks. Nearby, the Orthodox Jewish community on West Ridge Lawrence Avenue in is sometimes called Seoul Drive for the Korean community there, and the Persian food on Kedzie Avenue nearby is simply astonishing. At the Argyle Red Line stop, by the intersection of Argyle and Broadway, you'd be forgiven for wondering if you were still in America; Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian share space on a few blocks of restaurants, grocery stores, and even dentists. Neither the Swedish settlers who built Andersonville or the Germans from are the dominant presence in those neighborhoods any more, but their identity is still present in restaurants, cultural centers, and other small discoveries to be made.
Some of the communities on the and have faded or changed over the years. Little Italy was massive in the first half of the 1900s, but the construction of the Eisenhower Expressway and the University of Illinois at Chicago drove a stake through its heart. Traces do remain, though: start on Taylor Street, west of Halsted. Greektown, nearby on Halsted and Adams, was never as big as Little Italy, but its restaurants are incredible. and its neighbor struggled with population decline in the 1970's and 80's, but this trend was reversed in the 1990's as an abundance of housing stock and the area's architecture drew an influx of new residents, allowing hundreds of new businesses to open. Today, the area boasts numerous excellent stores and restaurants, and is a nice alternative to the more crowded shopping areas like Michigan Avenue. That success came with a price, though, as the original ethnic character of the neighborhoods fade to make way for condos and a more generic, thriving commercial zone. A similar situation hovers over Pilsen and Little Village, two neighborhoods on the Lower West Side where the Spanish signage outnumbers the English; after years of hard work by the primarily Hispanic residents to build up declining neighborhoods, fears persist that they may soon be outnumbered by young professionals looking for the next hot property zone, but it hasn't happened yet.
It's hard to imagine that being a concern for the Polish community on the ; Chicago is home to the largest number of people of Polish descent outside of !
sears tower
sears tower observation deck...sears tower
Sears Tower: Modern Marvels II
Sears Tower, Modern Marvels, History Channel...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Modern Marvels History Channel
Sears Tower: Modern Marvels I
Sears Tower, Modern Marvels, History Channel...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Modern Marvels History Channel
Sears Tower elevator ride (to 103rd, non-stop)
Ride the Sears Tower elevator in Chicago. From 0 to 103 non-stop!...Sears Tower Elevator Ride Chicago
Sears Tower: Modern Marvels V
Sears Tower, Modern Marvels, History Channel...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Modern Marvels History Channel
Going Up - Sears Tower Skydeck Elevator Video
to the 103rd story Sears Tower Skydeck, a top Chicago tourist attraction, see this video in the elevator ride up....Sears Tower Chicago tourist attraction
Sears Tower: Modern Marvels VI
Sears Tower, Modern Marvels, History Channel...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Modern Marvels History Channel
Lightning strikes Sears Tower
October 2, 2006 (Monday) Chicago, IL...lightning strike sears tower chicago thunderstorm rain weather
Sears Tower: Modern Marvels III
Sears Tower, Modern Marvels, History Channel...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Modern Marvels History Channel
Going Down - Sears Tower Skydeck Elevator Video
to the 103rd story Sears Tower Skydeck, a top Chicago tourist attraction, see this video in the elevator ride down....Sears Tower Chicago tourist attraction
Sears Tower: Modern Marvels IV
Sears Tower, Modern Marvels, History Channel...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Modern Marvels History Channel
Sears Tower: Megastructures VI
Sears Tower, National Geographic, Megastructures...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Megastructures National Geographic
Sears Tower: Megastructures (Español) I
Sears Tower, National Geographic, Megastructures...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Megastructures National Geographic
Sears Tower: Megastructures (Español) IV
Sears Tower, National Geographic, Megastructures...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Megastructures National Geographic
East into Chicago on Amtrak & Up the Sears Tower
A ride East into Chicago on Amtrak and then up to the observation deck of the Sears Tower....train ride Amtrak Chicago Sears Tower
Sears Tower: Megastructures (Español) III
Sears Tower, National Geographic, Megastructures...Sears Tower Skyscraper Chicago Megastructures National Geographic
Chicago #5 Sears Tower
The Sears Tower is a supertall skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois, and the tallest building in the United States since 1973. By the measurement from the ground to
Searstower
Searstower - Chicago...Searstower
Sears Tower: Megastructures (Español) V
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