Chicago is the city where modern architecture was invented, and its Riverwalk offers the world’s finest self-guided outdoor architecture museum — a corridor of skyscrapers ranging from the 1920s Neo-Gothic Tribune Tower to the 1960s Marina City corn-cob cylinders, all reflected in the green-tinted Chicago River. This companion post goes with a real chicago walking tour filmed in 4K, the video Chicago, The Magnificent Mile, Riverwalk — 4K Walking Tour, which strolls the Riverwalk and continues up the Magnificent Mile.
About This Walking Tour
This 4K tour captures the Chicago Riverwalk — a pedestrian-level promenade along the Chicago River’s south bank through the heart of downtown — and continues north up the Magnificent Mile on Michigan Avenue. The video showcases the architectural canyon that lines both banks of the river: the Tribune Tower (1925) with its Neo-Gothic buttresses and fragments of famous world buildings embedded in its base; the circular cylinders of Marina City (1964) by Bertrand Goldberg; the modernist IBM Building (now 330 N Wabash) by Mies van der Rohe; and the drawbridges that span the river at each cross street.
The walk then moves to Millennium Park, home to Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate sculpture — the polished steel “bean” that reflects the skyline and every visitor in a distorted mirror — and the Frank Gehry–designed Pritzker Pavilion. The Magnificent Mile covers the Chicago Water Tower (1869), one of the few structures to survive the Great Chicago Fire, the John Hancock Center (now 875 North Michigan), and ultimately Lincoln Park by the Lake Michigan shoreline.
Highlights of Chicago
Cloud Gate (The Bean) in Millennium Park, designed by Anish Kapoor and completed in 2006, weighs 110 tonnes and was fabricated from 168 stainless steel plates polished to a seamless mirror finish with no visible seams. Its surface reflects an elongated, distorted panorama of the Chicago skyline. Marina City, completed in 1964, was the first mixed-use residential skyscraper — its cylindrical towers with semicircular balconies house apartments, parking, a marina, and retail, and remain one of Chicago’s most distinctive silhouettes.
The Tribune Tower‘s Neo-Gothic base contains over 150 stone fragments embedded in the exterior — pieces of the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, the Berlin Wall, Westminster Abbey, and dozens of other world monuments, collected by Tribune correspondents over the decades. The Chicago Water Tower on Michigan Avenue, built in 1869 of Joliet limestone, was one of only a handful of structures to survive the Great Fire of 1871 — Oscar Wilde, visiting Chicago in 1882, called it “a castellated monstrosity with pepper boxes stuck all over it,” which only cemented its fame. The Riverwalk itself was expanded in 2015–2016 to add floating restaurant barges, kayak launches, and a marina to the pedestrian promenade level below street grade.
A Brief History of Chicago
Chicago was incorporated as a city in 1837 at the mouth of the Chicago River on Lake Michigan. The Great Chicago Fire of October 8–10, 1871 destroyed approximately 3.3 square miles of the city and killed around 300 people. The catastrophic rebuilding that followed attracted the greatest concentration of architectural talent in American history, and the Home Insurance Building (1885) by William Le Baron Jenney — a 10-storey iron and steel frame structure — is generally credited as the world’s first skyscraper.
Chicago reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900 using 8,575 workers and 18 months of engineering work — diverting sewage away from Lake Michigan by connecting the river to the Illinois and Michigan Canal. The city hosted the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which drew 27 million visitors and introduced the neoclassical “White City” model that influenced American urban planning for decades. The 20th century brought jazz, blues, Prohibition-era gangsters, the Great Migration of African Americans from the South, and the Chicago School of architecture that defined the modern skyscraper.
Practical Tips
The United States dollar (USD) is the currency. English is the primary language. Chicago’s CTA “L” (elevated) train system serves the city’s main attractions — the Red/Blue Lines to Monroe or Washington stations for Millennium Park and the Riverwalk. O’Hare International Airport is approximately 40 km from downtown; Midway Airport approximately 20 km. The Riverwalk is free to walk; the Chicago Architecture Center offers excellent guided river boat and walking tours for a fee. Summer temperatures are very pleasant; winters are severe with lake effect wind and snow.
Best Time to Visit
May through October for outdoor café season on the Riverwalk and Millennium Park events. The Chicago Jazz Festival takes place in Millennium Park in August. December brings the Christkindlmarket on Daley Plaza, one of the most atmospheric Christmas markets in North America. The architecture is equally compelling in winter when the reflections in the river are often clearer on crisp, still days.
Watch & Explore More
Watch the embedded 4K Riverwalk tour above to stroll one of America’s finest architectural corridors. For more American city walks, see New York City: Brooklyn Bridge to Central Park and Boston: The Freedom Trail. Subscribe to @walkingtoursvideoscom for walking tours from great cities around the world.