Walking Tour: Transit Time in the Loop Friday, April 5, 2019 (1:00PM – 2:00PM)
Along with the El, the Loop has been a place for compelling innovation and experimentation in its various transit stations, diagonal crosswalks, and recent bus rapid transit lanes. This tour will take visitors to a few of those key sites and also offer a bit of conversation about what might be next in the coming decades.
Walking Tour: Michigan Avenue, Repurposed Saturday, April 6, 2019 (2:00PM – 3:00PM)
Over time, Michigan Avenue from Congress Parkway to the Chicago River has been reimagined from a destination for massive mansions to a myriad of different commercial buildings, including hotels, condominiums, and higher education facilities. This walking tour will look at different and competing visions from the past and how changing patterns in how we live have transformed our ideas about what the future will be like along this celebrated street.
Walking Tour: The Mag Mile Grows Up Thursday, April 18, 2019 (4:00PM – 5:00PM) Meet outside the Wrigley Building, 400 North Michigan Avenue.
A century ago, Michigan Avenue and nearby Streeterville were rather sleepy places. With the completion of the Michigan Avenue (now DuSable Bridge), elaborate plans for the future emerged. Some plans were realized, including a number of marquee skyscrapers such as the Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower. Others took longer to come to fruition, and some were abandoned after economic slumps or a lack of political will. This tour will take visitors around this stretch of the Magnificent Mile and beyond to talk about a few of those plans.
Walking Tour: Radical Reinvention Friday, April 19, 2019 (12:00PM – 1:00PM)
The Loop is full of architecture that represents the pinnacle of works designed to offer new visions of the future written in stone, steel, glass, masonry, and other materials. This tour will take visitors around to some of the key sites (including Daley Plaza and the Monadnock Building) that offer some of Chicago’s most compelling moments from the past century or so.
