Cloud Gate is 168 stainless steel plates, welded and ground down until every seam disappears completely — a detail that reportedly took longer to get right than the sculpture's actual shape. Most people spend ten minutes photographing their reflection in it and then head for a cab. The walk from here to one of the best views in the country takes about forty minutes on foot, and most of it runs along a river most tourists never see.
This is a self-guided Chicago walking tour that starts at the sculpture everyone calls the Bean, drops down to the Riverwalk most guidebooks mention only in passing, and ends underneath — then 1,353 feet above — the Willis Tower. None of it needs a car, a tour bus, or a reservation made weeks out.
The sculpture its own sculptor didn't want nicknamed
Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate was dedicated in 2006 after a budget that more than doubled, to around $23 million, mostly because of how hard it is to weld stainless steel into a mirror-smooth curve with no visible joints anywhere. Chicagoans started calling it the Bean almost immediately. Kapoor reportedly disliked the nickname for years. It's the one that stuck anyway, and it's on more postcards now than the sculpture's actual name.
Walk all the way around it before you move on — the underside, where the plates curve up into a concave dome, throws the entire plaza back at you warped into a fisheye, and it's the one angle almost nobody bothers to photograph, because it means looking up instead of straight ahead.
Two towers that stare at each other, mouths open
A few steps east, Crown Fountain runs two 50-foot glass towers facing off across a shallow black-granite pool, each one playing a rotating slideshow of a thousand different Chicago residents' faces, a few minutes apiece. Every so often the face on screen puckers and a jet of water sprays out of the projected mouth — kids work this out faster than adults do, and get soaked on purpose.
The river Chicago spent a century turning its back on
From the fountain, cut north two blocks on Michigan Avenue and drop down the stairs just past the bridge to the Riverwalk — a continuous path along the south bank of the Chicago River that wasn't finished end to end until 2016, after decades of the waterfront being treated as the back of its buildings instead of the front. Old freight warehouses along this stretch are kayak counters and patios now, their chairs angled toward the water instead of away from it.
Keep walking west under five or six bridges and you'll pass the stretch where engineers permanently reversed the river's flow in 1900, sending it away from Lake Michigan and toward the Mississippi watershed instead, so the city would stop poisoning its own drinking water with its own sewage. Nothing marks the spot. That's sort of the point — one of the largest engineering projects in American history, and it looks like nothing at all from the path.
There's no plaque for where Chicago reversed its own river, but watch the current between the State and Wabash bridges — it runs away from the lake, not toward it. With Urban Tales running, this stretch of the Riverwalk plays automatically, so you already know what you're looking at before you get there.
The building everyone still calls by its old name
Climb back up around Franklin Street and walk a few blocks south, and the Willis Tower is hard to miss — 110 stories, the tallest building in the country for over forty years, until One World Trade Center opened in New York in 2014. It was the Sears Tower until 2009, when an insurance broker bought the naming rights. Most Chicagoans still call it the Sears Tower out of habit, and will correct you if you don't.
The Skydeck's glass balconies, called the Ledge, push about four feet out past the building's edge on the 103rd floor, with nothing but glass under your shoes and the Loop more than a quarter mile straight down. Go early if you can — the line for the Ledge boxes alone can run well past thirty minutes by early afternoon.
By the time you're standing in one of those glass boxes, you've covered four things most Chicago itineraries treat as separate car trips, all on foot, mostly along water. For the rest of what Urban Tales covers in the city, the Chicago page has the full list.
Chicago on foot: the Bean to the Skydeck
- 1Cloud Gate ("The Bean")168 welded steel plates, and no visible seam anywhere
- 2Crown FountainTwo towers, a thousand faces, water only in warmer months
- 3Chicago RiverwalkThe stretch where the city reversed its own river in 1900
- 4Willis Tower SkydeckGlass floor, 103 stories up, still called the Sears Tower by locals
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