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The Sears Tower’s North Side counterpart is this 100-story skyscraper. It houses a retail area, offices, and apartments – as well as an open-air observatory on the 94th floor.

Built entirely on landfill following the Great Chicago Fire (see 1871: Great Chicago Fire) this 200-acre (81-ha) park is the city’s largest and the site of summer music festivals (see Millennium & Grant parks).

Home to the Chicago Bears football team for over 30 years, the 1924-built lakeside stadium recently saw the addition of a controversial 63,000-seat structure. Critics have likened it to a padded toilet seat.

A former naval base turned fun-filled mecca, this is Chicago’s leading attraction.

This vast indoor sports arena and concert venue is also known as ‘the house that Michael built,’ as it was Michael Jordan’s fame that attracted the money to fund it. Outside the center there’s a statue of the now-retired, but ever-popular basketball player.

When built in 1964, these distinctive 60-story buildings (nicknamed the corncobs), were both the tallest residential and the tallest concrete structures in the world.

The largest (in floor area) commercial building in the world, this 1930-built structure covers two blocks and was run by the Kennedy family until the late 1990s.

The first convention center opened here in 1960 but burned down seven years later. Helmut Jahn built the second in 1971 at twice the size with 40,000 sprinkler heads. Three buildings now make up this complex, and are connected by a shop-lined promenade.

This is the third largest of the five Great Lakes. Water temperatures struggle to hit tepid during summer, but many beach-goers swim nevertheless. On a clear day, you can often see across to the shores of Indiana and Michigan.

Chicago’s 156-mile (251-km) long river tops world records with its 52 opening bridges. An extraordinary engineering feat resulted in the reversal of the river flow in 1900 (see 1900: Reversal of the Chicago River). Every St. Patrick’s day the main branch is dyed green.