Michigan Avenue and Water Tower Place the beautiful place

Michigan Avenue

Michigan Avenue: Instead of starting in the hurly-burly of Downtown, we suggest you first take stock of the from its most elegant street, certainly busy, but more measured in its pace. Chicagoans call the tree-lined stretch north of the Loop and the river up to Oak Street the Magnificent Mile. It contains the town's smartest high-fashion boutiques, jewelry stores, department stores, art galleries, and bookstores. Its image is such that when McDonald's (corporate headquarters: Chicago) wanted to open a branch here, neighboring merchants insisted that the decor be appropriate to the location.

The dominant landmark is the gigantic black-steel 100-story John Hancock Center (Www.johnhancockcenterchica-go.com) with its dramatic exterior -a diagonally strutted skeleton. This is a vertical street unto itself, soaring 1,107ft (337.5m) into the air. The first five floors are taken up with stores, then there are half a dozen floors for parking, and above that, the building has offices and apartments, with a Supermarket and a swimming pool for the residents. From the 94th-floor observatory, you have a view across to the Michigan shores of the lake, down over the Loop to the steel mills of Indiana, up the lakefront toward Wisconsin, and out across the flat residential neighborhoods of the West
Side.

 Michigan Avenue

Chewing-gum king

William Wrigley, Jr moved to Chicago in 1891 to do business selling soap and baking powder. He gave away chewing gum to his customers, but when he discovered how popular it was, he started to make and sell his own.
One block west of North Michigan, Rush Street is a lively entertainment area with outdoor cafés, nightclubs, restaurants, and taverns that come alive after dark. At Chicago Avenue and Michigan is a strange white-limestone turret that is, in fact, a historic monument, the Water Tower. It was built in 1869 to house a pumping station to take water from the lake and was the only public building to survive the Great Chicago Fire. Today it is surrounded by a pleasant park.

Bar talk and the Great Fire of 1871

It has been established that the Great Fire of Chicago began in the stable of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary over on the West Side on the evening of October 8, 1871. Then Chicago bar legend takes over to insist-and it's not wise to question stories told in a Chicago bar that it was all the fault of Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a paraffin lamp. At any rate, history does record that the fire raged for 27 hours, wiping out over 17,000 buildings, and when a rainstorm put it out, not only was the Water Tower still standing but - fact, not legend so was Mrs
O'Leary's stable.
Water Tower Place (845 North Michigan; www.shopwatertower.com) is an attractive shopping center with waterfalls playing alongside the escalators that carry you up to seven floors of stores and restaurants. Four blocks south, Ontario Street is 'gallery row' and has a thriving contemporary art scene.

 Michigan Avenue

Just before you reach the river, you might pause to take a view of one of the city's more bizarre skyscrapers. The cathedral-like Tribune Tower (http://tribunetower.info) has remarkable pseudo-Gothic pinnacles and porch, and 30 stories in between them. Built-in 1925 for the Chicago Tribune newspaper, it was the successful entry in America's most famous architectural competition. Many of the world's leading architects-a total of 233 entries from 23 countries- submitted designs, with the Bauhaus master Walter Gropius and the great Finnish designer Eero Saarinen among the unsuccessful entrants. Having persuaded the world by default that modern buildings should henceforth have modern designs, the tower became a unique and even lovable eccentricity.
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