CHICAGO ART WALK
We started our Chicago art walk from Hotel AC and did the entire loop on foot. That is the best way to understand Millennium Park. It is not a collection of separate sights but one continuous sequence from hotel to civic centre to sculpture to music to play to lake.
From AC Hotel Chicago Downtown in River North we walked south on Michigan Avenue across the river. In under fifteen minutes we were at the cultural corridor that tells the story of Chicago in layers. Opposite each other sit the nineteenth century library that became an art centre, a twenty first century mirrored sculpture that reflects the skyline, a stainless steel amphitheatre that brings concert hall sound outdoors, a serpentine bridge clad in metal scales, and a fantasy playground by Lake Michigan. We covered all of it without a taxi, which is exactly how the park was designed to be experienced.
AC Hotel by Marriott Chicago Downtown at 630 North Rush Street sits in Streeterville close to the Magnificent Mile. The location is ideal because you can walk to the riverwalk, to Michigan Avenue shopping and directly south to Millennium Park. From the lobby to the park gates is about ten minutes on foot. We left early morning and used Michigan Avenue as our spine for the whole day.
Directly opposite Millennium Park at 78 East Washington Street stands the Chicago Cultural Centre. It was completed in 1897 as the city’s first central public library and remains a Beaux Arts landmark with free admission.
Inside, the Preston Bradley Hall contains the dome everyone photographs. It is made of around thirty thousand pieces of Tiffany glass arranged in a honeycomb pattern and is regarded as the largest Tiffany dome in the world. Light filters through and colours the white marble staircase beneath.
During our visit the centre was hosting art installations by Vietnamese artists. The works used lacquer, silk, paper and moving image to explore themes of memory, migration and home. The contrast was striking, historic Tiffany glass above and delicate contemporary voices from Vietnam below, showing how the building still functions as a living civic gallery rather than a museum.
Anish Kapoor Installation, Cloud Gate
Stepping across Michigan Avenue you enter Millennium Park onto AT&T Plaza. Here stands Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate, known to all as the Bean.
Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai to an Indian father and an Iraqi Jewish mother. He moved to London in the 1970s, studied at Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art, won the Turner Prize in 1991 and was knighted in 2013. His work deals with void, mass and perception.
Cloud Gate was chosen in a 1999 international competition and is his first public outdoor work in the United States. It was fabricated in Oakland California using aerospace technology to bend one hundred and sixty eight stainless steel plates into a seamless form polished to optical reflectivity. It measures sixty six feet long by thirty three feet high by forty two feet wide and weighs one hundred and ten tons. The shape was inspired by liquid mercury.
It was unveiled incomplete in July 2004 for the park opening and formally completed on 15 May 2006 at a cost of twenty three million dollars funded entirely by private donors.
The sculpture works in two ways. From outside it reflects and distorts the skyline and clouds. Through a twelve foot arch you enter the omphalos, the concave chamber beneath, where your reflection multiplies and stretches. It is meant to be touched and walked under.
The Amphitheatre, Jay Pritzker Pavilion
Facing Cloud Gate across the Great Lawn is the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, the park’s amphitheatre and its acoustic centrepiece.
Designed by Frank Gehry, who accepted the commission in April 1999, it was built between June 1999 and July 2004 and opened on 16 July 2004. It is named for Jay Pritzker of Hyatt Hotels whose family gave fifteen million dollars towards its fifty million dollar cost. The city classified it as a work of art rather than a building to comply with Grant Park height restrictions.
The pavilion rises one hundred and twenty feet with Gehry’s signature billowing ribbons of brushed stainless steel framing the stage. It seats four thousand in fixed seats and seven thousand on the lawn, giving a total capacity of eleven thousand. A steel trellis over the lawn carries a three million dollar computerised sound system that gives outdoor listeners indoor concert hall quality and blocks traffic noise.
It is home to the Grant Park Symphony Orchestra and the Grant Park Music Festival, the nation’s only free municipally supported outdoor classical series, and since the first rock concert by Tori Amos on 31 August 2005 it has hosted opera, rock, Broadway and morning yoga.
The Snake Bridge, BP Pedestrian Bridge
From the pavilion we walked over the snake like overhead bridge you remembered with scales done in metal.
This is the BP Pedestrian Bridge, Frank Gehry’s first completed bridge. It is nine hundred and thirty five feet long and spans Columbus Drive to connect Millennium Park with the lakefront. It is named for BP which donated five million dollars.
It is described as snakelike because of its curving form and the exterior is clad in over ten thousand brushed stainless steel shingles in seventeen configurations, which give it the shimmering scaly skin you noticed. The deck is hardwood planks, there are no traditional handrails, only stainless steel parapets, and the five percent slope makes it fully accessible.
It also acts as a noise barrier protecting the Pritzker Pavilion lawn from traffic. Every curve offers a new view, the Bean behind you, the skyline ahead and Lake Michigan opening up.
The Children’s Park by Lake Michigan, Maggie Daley Park
The bridge lands in Maggie Daley Park at 337 East Randolph Street, the very well developed children’s park close to Lake Michigan.
Built on the former Daley Bicentennial Plaza and opened on 13 December 2014, the twenty acre park was designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates and named for former First Lady Maggie Daley. It cost sixty million dollars.
The three acre Play Garden includes six zones including the Wave, the Harbor with a fifty foot lighthouse and giant ship, the Enchanted Forest and the Slide Crater with spiral towers. There is also a forty foot climbing wall, an eighteen hole mini golf course, tennis courts and the quarter mile Skating Ribbon which is an ice path in winter and a rollerblade track in summer.
From its eastern edge you step onto the Lakefront Trail with Lake Michigan in front of you, the perfect end to a walk that began at Hotel AC and moved through history, art, music and play entirely on foot.
Never Miss the Garrett Popcorn Of Chicago
Garrett Popcorn Shops is a Chicago institution that has been making popcorn since 1949. The original shop opened at 10 West Madison Street and still stands today near the theatres and the lakefront. The brand is famous for two signature flavours. Garrett is known for its Chicago Mix which combines sweet caramel crisp popcorn with savoury cheese popcorn in one bag. The mix has become a symbol of the city and visitors often carry the striped blue tins as gifts when they leave Chicago.
What makes Garrett different is the method. Popcorn is cooked fresh throughout the day in small batches using traditional kettles. The caramel recipe uses brown sugar and butter and is coated by hand. The cheese blend uses real cheddar that gives a rich colour and sharp taste.
The aroma from the shops on Michigan Avenue draws long queues especially in summer and during the winter holidays. Locals judge the quality by the crunch which stays crisp for days if kept sealed.
Today Garrett has shops across Chicago, including O Hare airport, and locations abroad, but Chicagoans still regard the Loop shop as the true home.
Conclusion
We concluded this walk with a visit to the Art Institute of Chicago.
After walking the full loop from Hotel AC, through the Cultural Centre, across to Cloud Gate, into the Pritzker Pavilion, over the BP Bridge and down to Maggie Daley Park by Lake Michigan, we turned back west for the final ten minute walk to 111 South Michigan Avenue. It is the perfect place to end because Millennium Park is in essence its front lawn. The park gives you art in the open, the Institute gathers it together under one roof.
We finally arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago which has been dealt in detail separately by me in my blog here:
https://autarmota.blogspot.com/2026/09/a-visit-to-art-institute-chicago.html?m=1
( Avtar Mota )
CHINAR SHADE by Autarmota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 India License.Based on a work at http:\\autarmota.blogspot.com\.