Chicago travel guide

Top 10 sights in Chicago

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Daniel Schwen · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Willis Tower

   A 442-metre tower of nine bundled tubes, completed in 1973 as the Sears Tower and the world's tallest building for twenty-five years. The Skydeck on the 103rd floor has glass boxes that project a metre and a half out over Wacker Drive.

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2. 

   2© ajay_suresh · CC BY 2.0

   Art Institute of Chicago

   An encyclopaedic museum of 1879 whose American holdings include Hopper's Nighthawks and Wood's American Gothic, and whose Impressionist rooms are among the strongest outside Paris. The Modern Wing by Renzo Piano opened in 2009 with a bridge to Millennium Park.

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3. 

   3© No machine-readable author provided. JeremyA assumed (based on copyright claims) · CC BY-SA 2.5

   875 North Michigan Avenue

   A 344-metre tower of 1969 by Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan, whose exterior X-braces carry the loads and let the floor plates run column-free. The 94th-floor observatory tilts its windows outward, and the base sits on the Magnificent Mile.

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4. 

   4© https://www.flickr.com/photos/solarwind-chicago/ · CC BY 2.0

   Trump International Hotel and Tower

   A 423-metre condo-hotel of 2009 on the river, the second tallest building in Chicago, with setbacks aligned to the cornice heights of its older neighbours. Twenty-foot letters spelling the owner's name were added in 2014 and are widely disliked locally.

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5. 

   5

   Aon Center

   A 346-metre slab of 1973 originally clad in Carrara marble, which cracked in the Chicago winters and was replaced with white granite in the 1990s at a cost close to the original construction. It has no public observation deck.

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6. 

   6

   Millennium Park

   A park opened in 2004 over a rail yard, four years late and three times over budget, and now the most visited attraction in the Midwest. Anish Kapoor's polished Cloud Gate, Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain and Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion are all in it.

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7. 

   7© Sea Cow · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Field Museum of Natural History

   A natural history museum in a 1921 neoclassical hall, holding Sue — the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus known, bought at auction in 1997 for over eight million dollars. Its anthropology collections came largely from the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition.

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8. 

   8© zooey from Chicago, Illinois USA · CC BY 2.0

   Kenneth C. Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

   A science museum in the only major building left from the 1893 exposition, holding a captured German U-boat, U-505, brought across the lake in 1954 and now housed underground. A full coal mine and a 1930s streamliner are also inside.

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9. 

   9© The original uploader was Salsb at English Wikipedia. · CC BY-SA 2.5

   Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures, West Asia & North Africa

   A University of Chicago institute and museum founded in 1919 by James Henry Breasted with Rockefeller money, excavating in Iraq, Turkey and Egypt ever since. Its galleries hold a five-metre Assyrian winged bull from Khorsabad and a colossal Tutankhamun; entry is free.

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10. 

    10© Adler Planetarium · CC BY-SA 3.0

    Adler Planetarium

    The first planetarium in the western hemisphere, opened in 1930 on a peninsula in the lake with a Zeiss projector bought in Germany. Its Atwood Sphere of 1913 is still used, and the terrace has the best skyline view in the city.

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1. 

   1

   Barack Obama Presidential Center

   A presidential centre under construction in Jackson Park, whose 69-metre stone tower topped out in 2024 for an opening announced for 2026. Unlike previous presidential libraries it will hold no original papers, which are being digitised instead.

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2. 

   2© Joe Ravi · CC BY-SA 3.0

   South Side

   The largest of Chicago's three sides, running south from the Loop and historically the destination of the Great Migration from Mississippi and Alabama. Chicago blues, gospel and house music all came out of these neighbourhoods.

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3. 

   3© Zol87 from Chicago, IL, USA · CC BY-SA 4.0

   Mosque Maryam

   The headquarters of the Nation of Islam on South Stony Island Avenue, in a domed building of 1922 that was originally a Greek Orthodox church. Louis Farrakhan reopened it under this name in 1988, after Elijah Muhammad's first temple.

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   4

   Hull House

   The settlement house Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr opened in 1889 in an immigrant district on Halsted Street, offering classes, childcare and a public kitchen. It grew to thirteen buildings; two survive as a museum, and Addams took the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931.

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5. 

   5

   Grant Park

   Park on the Chicago lakefront, laid out from 1844 and kept free of buildings by court rulings. Millennium Park at its north end opened in 2004 with Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate.

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6. 

   6© TonyTheTiger at English Wikipedia (Original text: en:User:TonyTheTiger) · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Magnificent Mile

   The stretch of Michigan Avenue from the river to Oak Street, named in the 1940s by a developer and now carrying the department stores, the Water Tower and about a mile of flagship retail. Its bridge over the river is where the city's skyline photographs are taken.

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7. 

   7© Zol87 from Chicago, IL, USA · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Chicago Water Tower

   A 56-metre limestone tower of 1869 that pumped the city's water, and one of the very few structures to survive the fire of 1871 — which is why it stands alone among the shops. It now houses a small city gallery.

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   8

   Buckingham Fountain

   A rococo fountain of 1927 in Grant Park, modelled on the Latona basin at Versailles but twice its size, and given to the city by Kate Buckingham in memory of her brother. Four sea horses stand for the states around Lake Michigan, and the central jet reaches forty-five metres.

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9. 

   9© IvoShandor · CC BY 2.5

   Unity Temple

   Frank Lloyd Wright's Unitarian church of 1908 in Oak Park, built in poured concrete because the congregation could afford nothing else, and treated by Wright as the start of modern architecture. Light falls entirely from above; it became a World Heritage site in 2019.

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    10

    Fort Dearborn

    The US Army fort of 1803 at the mouth of the Chicago River, around which the city began. It was destroyed in 1812 when the garrison was attacked while evacuating; brass markers in the pavement at Michigan and Wacker trace its outline.

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