Chicago's history is written in what burned and what rose after: a fur-trading post at the river mouth, a fort lost in 1812, 3.3 square miles gone in 1871, and a company town whose strike stopped the nation's trains.
Bronze relief panels on the 1920 Michigan Avenue Bridge mark the 1803 Fort Dearborn stockade and Jean Baptiste Point DuSable's 1780s trading post. The southwest bridgehouse holds the McCormick River Museum, open 10:00-17:00.
Burnham & Root's 1888 Rookery wraps a skeletal iron frame in heavy masonry, and hides a light court that Frank Lloyd Wright reskinned in white marble and gold leaf in 1905. The lobby is open free on weekdays; guided tours run midday.
Opened in 1897 as the city's first public library and a Civil War veterans' memorial, this Beaux-Arts palace holds the world's largest Tiffany stained-glass dome — 38 feet across and roughly 30,000 pieces of glass. Free daily.
The castellated limestone tower of 1869 and its working Pumping Station across Michigan Avenue were among the handful of structures left standing when the Great Fire of October 1871 burned 3.3 square miles and left 100,000 homeless.
Founded in 1856, the city's oldest cultural institution keeps the bed Abraham Lincoln died in, an original Pullman sleeping car and full galleries on the 1871 fire and the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Open 9:30-16:30.
A bronze speaker's wagon at Randolph and Desplaines marks the labour rally of 4 May 1886 where a thrown bomb and the gunfire that followed killed seven policemen and four workers. The trial that came after gave the world May Day.
George Pullman's 1880 company town — rowhouses, hotel, market square and the Clock Tower factory — became a national park in 2015. The 1894 strike here halted rail traffic nationwide and created Labor Day. Visitor centre 9:00-17:00.
The 1927 granite column at 35th Street and King Drive honours the Eighth Illinois, the Black National Guard regiment that fought in France in 1918. Bronze plaques set in the pavement run south as the Bronzeville Walk of Fame.
Addams and Ellen Gates Starr took over this 1856 mansion in 1889 and turned it into America's most famous settlement house, serving thousands of immigrants a week. Two original buildings survive on the UIC campus. Closed Mondays.
Pilsen was Czech and Bohemian long before it became Mexican in the 1950s, and both eras are legible — the 1892 Thalia Hall opera house on 18th Street, then murals and the free Mexican art museum on 19th Street, open Tuesday-Sunday.
Wright built this shingled house in 1889 aged 22 and rebuilt it for two decades; the 1898 studio wing produced Unity Temple and the Robie House. Interior access is by guided tour only, hourly. Oak Park is 25 minutes on the Green Line.
Open since 1907 and controlled in the 1920s by Capone lieutenant Jack McGurn, the Green Mill still has its original green velvet booths, the long back bar and the trapdoor behind it. Live jazz nightly, poetry slam on Sundays.