Free previewStop 7 of Chicago Loop Architecture Walking Tour
Three-Foot Walls in a City of Glass
You're standing on East Washington Street, just across Michigan Avenue from Millennium Park, in front of the building Chicagoans call the Cultural Center. Look at the arched doorway and its bronze-framed doors, then at the pale gray stone around them. That's Bedford Blue limestone sitting on a granite base, and behind it the walls are about three feet thick.
Keep that number in mind, because of where you've just been. A few blocks back, the Reliance Building was going up in these same years with walls that were mostly plate glass. Chicago was inventing the skyscraper, the light steel frame, the building as a cage of windows. And when the city wanted its great public library, it built this: a masonry palace, designed not by a Chicago firm at all but by Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge of Boston.
The building opened in 1897 and cost nearly 2 million dollars.
That's the opening. The rest plays at stop 7 of Chicago Loop Architecture Walking Tour (3 min in all). Unlock the tour to hear it all, or try stop 1 free first.
