In & Around the Loop

The heart of the Loop is Chicago's business center, where you'll find the Chicago Board of Trade (the world's largest commodities, futures, and options exchange), Sears Tower, and some of the city's most famous early skyscrapers. If you're looking for an authentic big-city experience, wander the area on a weekday, when commuters are rushing to catch trains and businesspeople are hustling to get to work. The Loop is also home to one of the city's top museums, the Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a number of cultural institutions including the Symphony Center (home of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), the Auditorium Theatre, the Civic Opera House, the Goodman Theatre, and two fabulously restored historic theaters along Randolph Street. On the eastern edge of the Loop in Grant Park, three popular museums are conveniently located within a quick stroll of each other on the landscaped Museum Campus. Busy Lake Shore Drive, which brings cars zipping past the Museum Campus, was actually rerouted a few years ago to make the area easier to navigate for pedestrians.

The Loop Tour Train -- For a distinctive downtown view at an unbeatable price -- free! -- hop aboard the Loop Tour Train, a special elevated train that runs on Saturday from May through September. Docents from the Chicago Architecture Foundation point out notable buildings along the way and explain how the El shaped the city. Riders must pick up tickets at the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph St., beginning at 10am on the day of the tour; tours leave at 11am, 11:40am, 12:20pm, and 1pm from the Randolph/Wabash El station. For more information, call tel. 312/744-2400, or visit www.cityofchicago.org/exploringchicago.

The Pride of Prairie Avenue

Prairie Avenue, south of the Loop, was the city's first "Gold Coast," and its most famous address is Glessner House, a must-see for anyone interested in architectural history. The only surviving Chicago building designed by Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson, the 1886 structure represented a dramatic shift from traditional Victorian architecture (and inspired a young Frank Lloyd Wright).

The imposing granite exterior gives the home a forbidding air. (Railway magnate George Pullman, who lived nearby, complained, "I do not know what I have ever done to have that thing staring me in the face every time I go out my door.") But step inside, and the home turns out to be a welcoming, cozy retreat, filled with Arts and Crafts furnishings.

Visits to Glessner House are by guided tour only (they can also be combined with tours of the nearby Clarke House Museum, a Greek Revival home that's the oldest surviving house in the city). Tours begin at 1 and 3pm Wednesday through Sunday (except major holidays); tours of the Clarke House are given at noon and 2pm. Tours are first-come, first-served, with no advance reservations except for groups of 10 or more.

1800 S. Prairie Ave. tel. 312/326-1480. www.glessnerhouse.org. Admission $10 adults, $9 students and seniors, $6 children 5 to 12, free for children 4 and under; combination tickets for tours of the Glessner House and Clarke House cost $15 for adults, $12 student and seniors, and $8 for children. Admission for all tours is free on Wednesday. Bus: 1, 3, or 4 from Michigan Avenue at Jackson Boulevard (get off at 18th St.).

The Loop Sculpture Tour

Monuments, statues, and contemporary sculptures are on view throughout Chicago, but the concentration of public art within the Loop and nearby Grant Park is worth noting. The best known of these works are by 20th-century artists including Picasso, Chagall, Miró, Calder, Moore, and Oldenburg. The newest addition is the massive elliptical sculpture Cloud Gate (known as "The Bean" because it looks like a giant silver kidney bean) by British artist Anish Kapoor. The sculpture, in Millennium Park, was Kapoor's first public commission in the U.S.

A free brochure, The Chicago Public Art Guide (available at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St.), can help steer you toward the best examples of monumental public art. You can also conduct a self-guided tour of the city's best public sculptures by following "The Loop Sculpture Tour".

The single most famous sculpture is Pablo Picasso's Untitled, located in Daley Plaza and constructed out of Cor-Ten steel, the same gracefully rusting material used on the exterior of the Daley Center behind it. Viewed from various perspectives, its enigmatic shape suggests a woman, bird, or dog. Perhaps because it was the button-down Loop's first monumental modern sculpture, its installation in 1967 was met with hoots and heckles, but today "The Picasso" enjoys semiofficial status as the logo of modern Chicago. It is by far the city's most popular photo opportunity among visiting tourists. At noon on weekdays during warm weather, you'll likely find a dance troupe, musical group, or visual-arts exhibition here as part of the city's long-running "Under the Picasso" multicultural program. Call tel. 312/346-3278 for event information.

Oprah in Person

Oprah Winfrey tapes her phenomenally successful talk show at Harpo Studios, 1058 W. Washington Blvd., just west of the Loop. If you'd like to be in her studio audience, you'll have to plan ahead: Reservations are taken by phone only (tel. 312/591-9222), at least 1 month in advance. For information on upcoming shows, check the website (www.oprah.com); if you've got a great personal story that relates to a show being planned, submit it online and you just might get booked as a guest. If all else fails, you can always browse the O-logo merchandise at the Oprah Store, across the street from the studio.

Grant Park & Millennium Park

Thanks to architect Daniel Burnham and his coterie of visionary civic planners -- who drafted the revolutionary 1909 Plan of Chicago -- the city boasts a wide-open lakefront park system unrivaled by most major metropolises. Modeled after the gardens at Versailles, Grant Park (tel. 312/742-PLAY; www.chicagoparkdistrict.com) is Chicago's front yard, composed of giant lawns segmented by allées of trees, plantings, and paths, and pieced together by major roadways and a network of railroad tracks. Incredibly, the entire expanse was created from sandbars, landfill, and Chicago Fire debris; the original shoreline extended all the way to Michigan Avenue. A few museums are spread out inside the park, but most of the space is wide open (a legacy of mail-order magnate Aaron Montgomery Ward's late-19th-century campaign to limit municipal buildings).

The northwest corner of Grant Park (bordered by Michigan Ave. and Randolph St.) is the site of Millennium Park, one of the city's grandest public-works projects. Who cares that the park cost hundreds of millions more than it was supposed to, or the fact that it finally opened a full 4 years after the actual millennium? It's a winning combination of beautiful landscaping, elegant architecture (the classically inspired peristyle), and public entertainment spaces (including an ice rink and theater). The park's centerpiece is the dramatic Frank Gehry-designed Pritzker Music Pavilion, featuring massive curved ribbons of steel. The Grant Park Symphony Orchestra and Chorus stages a popular series of free outdoor classical music concerts here most Wednesday through Sunday evenings in the summer. For a schedule of concert times and dates, contact the Grant Park Music Festival (tel. 312/742-7638; www.grantparkmusicfestival.com). Two public artworks well worth checking out are the kidney bean-shaped sculpture Cloud Gate and the Crown Fountain, where children splash in the shallow water between giant faces projected on video screens. Free walking tours of the park are offered daily from Memorial Day through October at 11:30am and 1pm, starting at the park's Welcome Center, 201 E. Randolph St. (tel. 312/742-1168).

During the summer, a variety of music and food festivals take over central Grant Park. Annual events that draw big crowds include a blues music festival (in June) and a jazz festival (Labor Day). The Taste of Chicago (tel. 312/744-3315; www.cityofchicago.org/specialevents), purportedly the largest food festival in the world (the city estimates its annual attendance at around 3.5 million), takes place every year for 10 days around the 4th of July. Local restaurants serve up more ribs, pizza, hot dogs, and beer than you'd ever want to see, let alone eat.

Head south to the lake via Congress Parkway, and you'll find Buckingham Fountain, the baroque centerpiece of the park, composed of pink Georgia marble and patterned after -- but twice the size of -- the Latona Fountain at Versailles, with adjoining esplanades beautified by rose gardens in season. From April through October, the fountain spurts columns of water up to 150 feet in the air every hour on the hour, and beginning at 4pm, a whirl of colored lights and dramatic music amps up the drama. The fountain shuts down at 11pm; concession areas and bathrooms are available on the plaza.

Sculptures and monuments stand throughout the park, including a sculpture of two Native Americans on horseback, The Bowman and the Spearman (at Congress Pkwy. and Michigan Ave.), which was installed in 1928 and has become the park's trademark. Also here are likenesses of Copernicus, Columbus, and Lincoln, the latter by the great American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, located on Congress Parkway between Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive. On the western edge of the park, at Adams Street, is the Art Institute , and at the southern tip, in the area known as the Museum Campus, are the Field Museum of Natural History, the Adler Planetarium, and the Shedd Aquarium.

To get to Grant Park, take bus no. 3, 4, 6, 146, or 151. If you want to take the subway or the El, get off at any stop in the Loop along State or Wabash, and walk east.

Along South Michigan Avenue

Fashion and glamour might have moved north to the Magnificent Mile, but Chicago's grandest stretch of boulevard is still Michigan Avenue, south of the river. From a little north of the Michigan Avenue bridge all the way down to the Field Museum, South Michigan Avenue runs parallel to Grant Park on one side and the Loop on the other. A stroll along this boulevard in any season offers both visual and cultural treats. Particularly impressive is the great wall of buildings from Randolph Street south to Congress Parkway (beginning with the Chicago Cultural Center and terminating at the Auditorium Building) that architecture buffs refer to as the "Michigan Avenue Cliff."