Open house

There are many reasons why Chicago is the best, and one of them is Open House Chicago, an annual event held by the Chicago Architecture Foundation to celebrate all of the cool architecture in the city.

If you know one unconditionally positive thing about Chicago, it should be the architecture. Our housing stock is unlike anywhere else. Our downtown has so many masterpiece-grade buildings that it sometimes feels impossible. And for one weekend in October every year, hundreds of places open for behind-the-scenes tours, usually their only opportunity for the general public to experience them. This happens all over the city, in almost every neighborhood. You can kill an entire weekend just touring the stuff that’s open in Englewood. (I can attest; I did that in 2018.) Everything is free.

The kind of access that Open House Chicago gets is truly absurd:

• The CTA sometimes opens their private control center and rail repair shops to the public.
• The city itself gives tours of its infrastructure, including the massive facility where most of its trucks are serviced.
• Shuttered downtown speakeasies open for tours for the first time in 50 years.
• At one point, the largest & most expensive residence in the city, Cardinal House, was slated for a one-off tour, the first time it had ever opened to the public. It was scheduled for… October of 2020. Oops.