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Willis Tower Skydeck
Willis Tower topped out on May 3, 1973, and opened that September as the Sears Tower, at the time the tallest building in the world — a title it held for roughly two and a half decades before being surpassed by newer skyscrapers in Asia. The Skydeck observation deck opened the following year, on June 22, 1974, on the 103rd floor, 1,353 feet above the street, and is described as the highest observation deck in the United States. The Skydeck draws roughly 1.7 million visitors annually on its own, but its most talked-about feature came decades later: a major renovation beginning in January 2009 added retractable glass balconies, informally called "The Ledge," that extend visitors out over open air with nothing but glass beneath their feet. The all-glass boxes, rated to hold five short tons, opened to the public on July 2, 2009, with a fifth glass ledge added on the building's west facade in May 2022. The building itself was renamed Willis Tower in 2009 following a lease agreement with Willis Group Holdings, a rebrand that took years for many longtime Chicagoans to actually adopt in casual conversation, where "Sears Tower" stuck around informally for a long time afterward. For a Chicago attractions list, the Willis Tower Skydeck is the essential "step out over the city" entry — a fifty-year-old observation deck whose glass-floored ledges have made it one of the most viscerally memorable single moments on any Chicago visit.
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Cloud Gate (The Bean)
Cloud Gate was unveiled in incomplete form during Millennium Park's grand opening on July 15, 2004, then formally dedicated on May 15, 2006, once artist Anish Kapoor's construction team had finished polishing its 168 welded stainless steel plates into a single seamless reflective surface. It was Kapoor's first major outdoor public work in the United States, selected through a design competition over submissions from roughly thirty other artists, including Jeff Koons. Kapoor drew his design inspiration from liquid mercury, and the finished sculpture — 33 by 66 by 42 feet, weighing 110 short tons — distorts and reflects the Chicago skyline and sky above it into a genuinely disorienting, endlessly photographable surface. Its nickname, "The Bean," was reportedly dismissed by Kapoor himself as "completely stupid" when it first caught on, before both the artist and the public fully embraced it as the sculpture's actual identity. Sitting at Grainger Plaza inside Millennium Park, in the heart of Chicago's Loop, Cloud Gate has become one of the most photographed pieces of public art in the country, less because of any formal art-world consensus and more because the piece is built to interact with — visitors don't just look at it, they see themselves and the city distorted inside it, which makes it a genuinely different experience for every person who walks underneath it. For a Chicago attractions list, Cloud Gate is the essential "free, world-famous, and built to be touched" entry — a mercury-inspired sculpture that turned a downtown plaza into one of the most recognizable pieces of public art anywhere in the world.
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