Chicago Audio Tours

Chicago burned in October 1871 -- three square miles consumed in two days, 300 people dead, a third of the city homeless. The response was arguably the most consequential act of urban reconstruction in American history. Architects descended on the empty lots and invented the modern city: the Home Insurance Building, completed here in 1885, is generally credited as the world's first skyscraper. The Chicago School that followed -- Adler and Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Louis Henry -- produced buildings that still anchor the downtown Loop, each block functioning as a catalog of structural ambition that you can read as you walk.

Walk along the Chicago Riverwalk and you see what the city has been doing since: turning its industrial infrastructure into something worth living near.

Engineers reversed the Chicago River's direction in 1900 to protect the city's drinking water from the lake -- an undertaking so audacious that it still seems improbable. Millennium Park opened in 2004 with Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate reflecting the skyline back at itself. The L train rattles overhead through the Loop, which is the only elevated train system threading through a downtown in America. Blues clubs on the South Side predate the tourist economy by several decades and are still operating. Deep dish pizza is not a joke; it is an architectural statement in crust form, and it is still argued about with the devotion of a civic religion.