Chicago Cruise

Everything a chicago cruise passes today sits on ground shaped by that decision.

The river's banks were industrial long before they were scenic. Grain elevators, tanneries and coal wharves lined the South Branch through the nineteenth century. The Great Fire of 1871 cleared 3.3 square miles of the city, and the rebuilding that followed produced the first generation of steel-frame towers. Architects arriving for the work — Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, John Wellborn Root — treated the burnt district as a laboratory. The result was the Chicago School, a vocabulary of load-bearing steel skeletons, wide plate-glass windows and ornament restricted to the entrance and cornice.

That vocabulary is still legible from the water, which is why the architecture boat tour became the city's signature form of sightseeing rather than a sideline. Wacker Drive's double-decked roadway, completed in 1926 on the line of the old South Water Street market, frames the view. The Wrigley Building rises in glazed terra cotta from 1924. Tribune Tower answers it in neo-Gothic limestone from 1925, its flying buttresses crowned above the thirty-sixth floor. Marina City's twin corncobs, finished in 1964 to Bertrand Goldberg's design, hold 896 apartments on circular floor plates with no interior right angles. The 333 West Wacker curtain wall, green glass bent to the river's bend, dates to 1983. Mies van der Rohe's IBM Plaza stands at 330 North, dark bronze and steel, his final American commission.

Seen in sequence, these buildings record a century of structural argument. The nine-foot drop in water level between the lake and the canal is managed by locks at the river mouth, and the three branches meet at Wolf Point, where the city's first permanent trading post stood in the 1820s. Thirty-eight movable bridges cross the system, most of them double-leaf trunnion bascules, a Chicago-perfected type raised in spring and autumn flotillas as sailboats move between winter berths and the lake.

The river is now a civic room. The Riverwalk, extended westward in phases through 2016, pulled restaurants and kayak liveries onto a working channel that carried barges within living memory. Demand follows: a chicago cruise tour for architecture, a chicago cruise dinner service at dusk, chicago cruise events scheduled around the summer fireworks calendar, and competing operators running as a chicago cruise line from docks between Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive. Chicago River landmarks are legible in a way few skylines are, read in profile from mid-channel at 45 USD for a standard adult architecture ticket. A chicago cruise ticket remains, in essence, a seat at a lecture delivered by the buildings themselves — the only vantage from which the city still explains its own construction.