Chicago Architecture Boat Tour River Cruise I Chicago River Architecture Tour I @Happy Mom Mariann
hello everyone this is happy ma marian welcome to my youtube channel today we're going to show you our ultimate chicago architecture experience and this is the city's most popular tour the chicago architecture river cruise in just 90 minutes you'll get the best overview of chicago's architecture and its history and they will share the fascinating stories behind more than 50 buildings along the chicago river so hope you all enjoy and finish the video and see you in the next and more of chicago tour videos from happy memory thank you exterior is clouded like terra cotta originally several different shades of it the bottom was a light colored blue the top was a bright white radiantly it would draw your eyes skyward today pretty much one standard color of that white glazed terracotta designed by gracement to be beautiful from every single angle it certainly is this first bridge we pass under is the michigan avenue bridge notice it's also called dusable bridge it's named after our first non-native settler his full name was point du sable he settled here on the corner of michigan avenue around 1780. his name may sound french to you but he was not he was a haitian descent and after the tour if you go on the upper level of michigan avenue you'll see a little bus of dusable that area is called pioneer court lake after him in front of the vessel we have a silver tall tower with a decorative spire at the top this is currently our second tallest building in chicago trump tower and international hotel this is from 2009 it's by adrian smith of the firm skidmore owings of merrell adrian smith is a chicago architect on the 98th floor now check out the style of windows they chose for the tower this specific style of window is called a mission style why would they choose that specific style well you'll see emerging on the right hand side this plain black building its neighbor is a messian building so it's directly referencing that south facing neighbor giving a little tip of the hat some acknowledgement that the black building was there first now the plain black building is ama plaza this is by ludwig mies van der rohe he's the father of modern architecture we're going to hear his name a lot too so this design is very significant it's called black box modernism this style was born out of a 20-year gap in u.s history in which not much was being built we've gone through the great depression and then world war ii it was a very frugal generation so we have a very frugal skyscraper it is literally just steel holding it up glass holding it in and that's it no decoration no filigree the bare bones of a skyscraper miss vanderbilt coined the term less is more can you say that you're quoting him next to him on the right are these two curvilinear towers and these are called marina city in chicago we lovingly refer to these as the corn cob towers because they resemble giant ears of corn the inspiration however was flower petals not corn kernels and these were designed by bertrand goldberg he was a student of mies vanderbilt so you have a student and teacher side by side pretty obvious their ideas about architecture are so different they're almost direct opposites of one another now these two towers were completed in 1964. they're known as a city within the city right through the building i especially love seeing this building on beautiful clear days like today it has such an open light and airy quality to it next to them on the left we have a blue glassy tower its neighbor a throne shaped stone clad building and these two neighbors are also referencing one another so check out the first balcony on the blue glossy tower you'll see it's at the very same height of the first setback of the stone-clad building next to it top of the stone club building the same height as that second opening the stone clad buildings from 1930 the lasalle whacker she was there first so again when the more modern neighbor comes to take the side of an older building they often give that acknowledgement that tip of the hat that you can't before me so we will see this relationship a lot along the river as i said they reference their neighbors the history the location the environment just makes for a more friendly more cohesive skyline it's kind of a sign of respect on the left-hand side you can also see our riverwalk so this is a 100 million dollar project every section or room of the river walk is a different theme for right now it does seamlessly connect the lakefront to the wolfpoint area and in the future we will be extending it frontal point all the way to chinatown our new riverwalk going underneath the bridges was previously but over the bridges so now it's wheelchair accessible and just a lot nicer for everybody else on the right hand side we have this super massive art deco building it's impossible to miss merchandise mart this is by graham anderson perks and white again and it was commissioned by marshall field and company the man who invented department stores so here's an example of art deco this style was the response to that euro-centric style of architecture so this is more modern and this is more american with art deco we're going to keep a stone clad exterior this one's platinum limestone which is a locally sourced material with art deco we also have recess ribbon windows that draw your eyes skyward it loves that height and verticality set back to the top the staircase effect geometry like gold diamonds and chevron shapes so very symmetrical very geometric sometimes referred to as streamlined futurism this is what we thought the future was going to look like so the roaring 20s were very optimistic time in american history the style reflects that optimism using expensive materials and structures soaring up into the sky like visual progress this style was very popular mid-20s early 30s and then afterwards the stock market crashed and the great depression happened now we are going to see a lot of art deco today you'll become very familiar with it there's a lot of examples on the river here we are now we are in the y-shape intersection of the river this is called wolf point this is where the main branch the north branch and the south branch of the chicago river meet now in front of us you'll see several blue skyscrapers and some construction here so all of these guys are brand new the construction to the right is one point tower south it's going to be the top if you look inside the parabolic arch at the bottom you'll see the glass is tilted back so it mirrors that sculpture the river and the little walk the curving facade mimicking the curvature of the river this is also cloud of blue glass when you see this this is the new trend in architecture see how these blue glassy buildings almost disappear up into the sky that's the trend now we're not going to have a name for the new style of architecture until we're done using it and moving on to the next thing it's just like with art you need a little distance on the subject before you can give it a good accurate name while you're using it is this blue tower with the balconies well point tower west so this is 42 stories tall it's by kelly clark peli anything you see with balconies like this you can have a look at it's going to be a residential tower that's your giveaway the tower has this silver piping running the length of the tower giving it an updated look to those mesian style windows that we talked about earlier in front of the vessel we have this raised bridge this is the old carroll avenue railroad bridge we used to use it you can tell we don't anymore now every bridge we pass under does open up and move just like this one we're going to talk about the engineering later on so this is a really good visual to keep in the back of your mind especially that block of concrete that counterweight we're going to reference that later so just keep that image with you and right across from the raised bridge on the left hand side are these triangle-shaped rigger cottages and these are by harry reese and associates so he served in the navy and he loved nautical themes so lots of his buildings have triangle shapes to resemble sails on a boat around windows like portholes on a ship and then they have their own arena as well these are only four units and they're from 1989 they had never not been occupied until 2015 the third unit inn went up for sale for the first time ever it sold in just two weeks and it went for 2.25 billion dollars just ahead of us here is a residential area where we're going to be making our first spin on the tour so adam is a really good time if you'd like to ask any questions i'll take a quick walk around and see if you have any questions yet also perfect time for the visit jake at the bar he's got all kinds of stuff down there for you especially ice cold bottles of water please make sure you stay hydrated so sit back relax and enjoy the boat ride we're gonna turn around so of course i got a couple of questions about the cocoa smells so it is the blobbers chocolate factory they're cocoa produced certainly outsource that cocoa you can't see the factory but sometimes on some days you can smell those cocoa smells in the pockets around the city continuing on here with some architecture and history on the right-hand side you'll see this pink brick building just give it a minute these trees are pretty full right now pink brick building with the nautical house it was a giant refrigerator one of many but we kept the mint from the union stockyards so chicago's chief industry for a long time was the union stockyards we did mass production smaller houses about a hundred thousand animals a day we're slaughtered here in chicago mostly on the south branch now we needed a giant refrigerator to put a lot of that meat so here was one of them if you look at the balconies here you'll see the walls in some places are four feet thick so thick walls insulating the building keeping it cool now this was renovated into condos by harry reis he likes those nautical themes so they added a marina some nautical star details just for decoration towards the top or around windows put your camera off the port side you can enjoy that beautiful view and as a heads up we're going to be making three turns on this journey so if it looks like we missed a building on the way up guess what we're probably going to get it all the way back so we will be then walk through a lot of great spaces so the bench partners we're just left with that narrow sliver gland to build on and they made it work is finished up in 2017. now fridge raising
season is upon us so you're going to see a lot of bridge maintenance happening on this journey to keep the footprint extremely small and then set back to the river that's 30 feet inside we have another super massive art deco building and this one looks like a giant throne this is the civic opera building again by graham anderson hopes in life so this is from 1930 that art deco style has a tendency to draw it really does resemble a giant frog society a utility magnate who made lots of money i talked about my guards so he commissioned this you'll see that on some neoclassical and art deco buildings it's just to make them seem older than they actually want on the left-hand side you have this brown building with the serrated edges this is the chicago perfect tile exchange center that uses serrated edges to optimize corner office spaces everybody likes a corner office with a view and you don't want people fighting over them within your company so they optimize those spaces to keep the piece the middle portion being a double-decker trade floor and here's yet another barge during the maintenance come over to the right you can see here our metro train coming into union station so if you're coming in we're leaving by train here's we're picking up there's also an amtrak so again if it's pretty noisy on the river just put it right here so this is what air rights construction looks like real companies like these ones and all of the land among heroes and we're still actively using israel so no one is selling this plan to you what they will do is for 99 years they will allow you to put support columns to go along the train tracks if you build a platform and your skyscraper goes on top so that's airbride's construction and everything we saw on the right starting with the weisha green curving building and this is gateway center form same firm again skidmore owings and merrell but here they are in the 1980s where we're really done with black box modernism we'll keep the steel and we'll keep the glass but we no longer want buildings that go anywhere we want buildings for right here so post modernism is site specific architecture and this is a really beautiful example of that so we have this curving facade to mimic the curving river green tinted windows like the green of the river the windows are bubbled out and pinched in to give it this wavy appearance like water it's almost like the building is rising out of the chicago river or maine on a river itself it's lovingly embracing its surroundings so it's aging really well so it's from the 80s whistle comes off as extremely modern and thanks to those gateway centers you get this little step-by-step example of exactly where our architecture trends have evolved from and today as i said we're doing those blue glossy buildings on the right hand side you have yet another super massive art deco building it's again by graham and middle of the building like no big deal the reason we have a post office this size is because the mail order catalog business was started in chicago so you ordered some goods from montgomery ward or from sears they'd be shipped from this location to catch the trains underneath the ground to show them to us on the left these are brand new residential towers as we go down you're gonna see behind this blue fencing we really appreciate when they have these building materials out because you get to see what the groundwork of a skyscraper is you briefly heard me mention case on so what are those well as we go by you'll see a bunch of them so basically they're just here only the one got built you can see those blank spaces of concrete that's where the addition was going to attach and then further snake down the river he's using four in place concrete now this is a really great material you can shape it however you like to so if you like building in circles then this really is the material for you here he left the concrete raw and unpainted an architecture that's called brutalism now lots of people tell me they do not like the look of brutalism we're all concrete is not singing their hearts on i understand that it's a bit stark and a bit heavy but i think of it as a very horrible this is a city within a city inside all of your modern audiences and what that does is it continually agitates the water so that ice has no chance to form on the surface and they can leave their boats in these waters all year long now for everyone else in the city you've got to go to drydocks for the winter you cannot leave your boat in these icy waters it will get destroyed so just marina city and river city have those bubbling systems and they get to stay and shoot them up in the air they go about 14 stories they're absolutely powerful so there's our first response it's kind of a weird rule but basically radio antenna were using them they could break and be replaced because it's not a permanent fixture it does not count as a total height on the other hand a decorative spire is a permanent fixture and that does count as the total height now i say the tower is 110 stories tall i do count the top utility closets that blink get you sometimes there's two basement floors it's by skidmore owings and merrell we talked about them a lot with those gateway centers and the evolution of architecture and this is another now they have an observation deck up there it's called the ledge i am going to point that out and get closer and we'll see exactly what that looks like but before we go any further we do have to tell that's where we sold our grain futures so the statue is the roman goddess of grave her name is ceres like cereal compare that statue of ceres to the vase of windows and you can see she's over three stories tall it's 31 feet in total the building is from 1929 by holly bird and root that year and then 20 years after the board of trade was the tallest building here in the city of chicago now the statue series has no face people say it's because the architects were so proud of the building being so tall they thought no one's going to notice the statue has been faced that's not really true from the street level you can tell she's faceless it's just art deco so art deco will streamline everything oftentimes even your face right off of you if you think of the oscar statue that too is art deco and he too is the right hand side we have this dash dash balcony building in gray and dark gray it's a recent residential tower that it's just known for its address us docents have been calling it the morris code building just for fun we did translate it into morse code it doesn't mean anything it's just gibberish what we found like trucks is cars cars and trucks trucks and i've also got some really if you're nice for a really good photo of the series we're going to talk about his pink neighbor with us this is a giant map you can see towards the top that y-shaped intersection of wolf point where the river branches to the north south and main branch you can also see these squares that's our grid and walt disney adopted our city plan for his theme parks that's why they're so clean or really nice he got that from the city of chicago he was a big fan of us all right we'll see if anyone's pledged this morning if you want to look to the right all the way up i'll one hundred and third floor you'll see those boxes yeah i can see some people in there so there's the ledge this is a glass box it comes a little over four feet off the edge of the dome you can look really cool what they did in there so check it out if you haven't got inside a super tall skyscraper both observation decks are great you'll be happy with either one of those claws out the front huge setback to move the weight off the train tracks it's from 1929 first attempt on air rights construction some egyptian boss reliefs on the exterior to document the written word this was the original location at the bottom so they're there to exhaust the trains underneath the ground when they hide it with some trouble here and this was originally designed for the morton salt company if you look up at the top of the main tower you'll see six holes here's more different treatments and we talked a little bit about the sears slash willis tower swaying in the wind but what happens to something like this y-shaped tower when the winds pick up and they often do so this tower has 12 inertial slosh dampeners they're huge concrete canisters they're filled with thousands of gallons of water so as the wind is blowing the building in one direction the water in the tank will slosh to the opposite direction just enough to dampen the inertia to keep it from swaying too much in the wind which of course makes people feel very uncomfortable but this tower has a sway along with three inches on either side but it's more important for our towers to bend with the wind almost dance with the forces of nature then for them to feel stressed buff will break and snap so most skyscrapers in chicago they do have a little bit of wiggle to them and towards the end of the tour we're going to see chicago's recognize the building from ferris bueller's day off these are the offices of ferris is dead there's also a train coming up behind us it's going to get noisy just bear with me here it's the green line again so here's some more of that site specific architecture from the 1980s that aged really well we've got a curving facade like the curving river alternating blue and green glass matching the green of the river this color is done in a horizontal pattern since your eye goes across the curve to appreciate it the best part however the super reflective nature of the glass what better way to stay relevant that you just hold up a giant curving mirror and change with the environment around you so any photos i had of this building before 2017 it didn't look anything like this because these five towers at wolf point they didn't exist yet people in chicago would you call them the pez dispenser hall of fame because they kind of look like giant places on the left hand side we have a red brick building that says chicago school on the outside this is the helen curtis building it's from 1914. now here's an example of chicago's school of architecture now this style has three parts it's called a tripart design so the bottom has a strong base the middle has a soaring shaft at the top a decorative capital base shaft capital same components of a greek enrollment called great classic design now school of architecture has been famous by louis sullivan if you're looking for somebody with sullivan buildings you won't find them on the river uh if you've been to that target on state street in the loop with that beautiful ironwork that's a lewis sullivan building some of his iron work is also in the art institute so he's around but not on the river and back in 1914 the helen curtis was a coffee warehouse now left-hand side breakfast building with the clock tower is the reed murdock center and it's also from 1914 so they're the same age back then he was a grocery warehouse and this is by george c nimmins this style of architecture is called prairie school school is made from us by frank lloyd wright where will we find him again not on the river so franklin right has one interior downtown it's inside of the rotary most of frankfurt right buildings are up old park so that's west up here he has one more rogers park so again they're around just not everybody's on the river as i said is pretty unpopular to the beautiful union carbide and carbon now this is from 1929 that was the height of prohibition when alcohol in this country was illegal and it was built to look like a giant champagne bottle pretty inconspicuous now this opened up recently as the hotel pen dream sometimes i like to say that architecture is much like history that's frozen in time and when i look at this building i know exactly what was going on in history chicagoans were told you cannot do something and this was our attitude about it of course we never stopped drinking there was a car elevator inside the idea was you drive your car into the building take it to any of the first 23 floors so you're unloading your valuables in the security of that space not out in the street where you might get robbed by gangsters or whoever now the car elevator was very difficult to maintain only lasted 14 years and then they removed it turning that core into opposites now she was supposed to have a sister tower that was identical right next door but after her completion in 1929 the stopwater crashed the great depression happened so only the one here was freelance lord elite skinny ribbon windows drawing your eyes skyward to lead you to the distinctive spidery crown with the flying buttresses in the terrace based off natural debut the butter tower in france if you'd like to point your eyeballs and cameras to the left you'll see three historic stonefly buildings the wrigley building hotel intercontinental and the tribune tower so if we were here in the late 1920s this is the view we would have gotten almost exactly beautiful so the foster partner also using that prairie spirit of architecture so loading flat like a prairie and then a see-through design so you can still see the details i am going to point out that john hancock it's very hard to see on the tour so just bear with me if you're interested look sharply to the left in the distance it's very sweet guys so genie gang is one of the biggest and brightest architects that are coming up in the world right now so we're really happy to have her back building the tallest tower is 101 stories 1191 feet so this is not just chicago's new third tallest tower in our city this is the world's tallest tower designed by a female-led architectural firm so that's pretty cool so you can really tell genie gang's influence she loves water this is from the 1970s it's by shipwreck and heinrich they were students of ludwig van der rohe so we can really tell what was going on playing with that nissian design black box modernism around the corners cutting down on wind noise curving facade to optimize those views visiting them you should really make sure you call them and be sure and here we are passing under lakeshore drive where yet more bridge maintenance is going on although we've been working on this bridge for this like the third year now so this has been kind of a heavy duty project they've replaced a lot of the steel here you can see the new pieces and the little pieces they have just renamed glacier drive to java lakeshore drive and after our first non-data they will be turning this kind of land here with two dusable park once they're done with all this construction and there's gonna be two more super tall skyscrapers all that probably up there so after all the constructions inside with the ferris wheel here we are at navy pier which tends to be our number one tourist attraction here in chicago it goes mechanic with millennium park for that so these are our locks if we wanted to go into the lake we would have to do what's called blocking through and that takes a really long time that we don't have instead what we're going to do is make our final spin and then we're going to tell a couple more stories and then we're going to head right into doc while we're making this final spin you can either spot now there's a lot of stuff to do with baby pier if you haven't been already so they have a brand new hotel classic lake tourist shops restaurants amusement park rides the ferris wheel is the most notable feature which is 200 feet tall it's called centennial wheel it is a birthday present for navy pier in 2016 she turned 100. so the pier was born back in 1916 it was a municipal gear this is where we did a lot of our shipping during world war ii this was a naval and airport training in the 80s the average is around 18 to 20 feet for this river there's a white clay bottom which really reflects that algae up towards the surface we do dye the river on st patrick's day this is the chicago plumbers association they have a powdered vegetable dye it's a bright orange color and when it interacts with the natural green algae it turns the river a bright cali green almost a neon color so if you look it up it's very different from the green here today very very bright and very neon so that dye is biodegradable doesn't hurt the fish only that's industrial river this is where all of our garbage went including any animal debris from the union stockyards so it was foul smelling and disgusting and extremely toxic so this toxic river was flowing into lake michigan and that's the fresh we can't let you disembark until we're securely docked and only the captain knows when that has happened so please wait for the all clear and have a seat until you get them as you're leaving us today if you took a boarding photo make sure you check those out chicago those bubbles are for you it's very nice so i can't think of a better way to end our journey than you
2021-09-19 20:40
