Curated Itinerary
Art Déco in Chicago: A Walking Tour of the Loop
Six buildings of the late 1920s in the Loop: Riverside Plaza, the Bankers Building, the Field Building, the Board of Trade, the Main Post Office and One North LaSalle.
Take this route into Google Maps
From Riverside Plaza (1929), Chicago, Illinois to One North LaSalle Street Building (1930), 1 North LaSalle Street, Chicago Loop, Illinois, in the order we curated them.
➤ Turn on the navigator in Google MapsIt opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
Chicago rebuilt its Loop at the end of the 1920s, and the Art Deco that came out of it is dense enough to walk in an afternoon. Six buildings within about a kilometre of each other.
What you see
The route opens at Riverside Plaza (Holabird & Root, 1929), the first American skyscraper built over railway air rights, and the Bankers Building (1927) on LaSalle Street. The Field Building (1934) is the last major tower before the Depression stopped construction; the Board of Trade (1930) closes the LaSalle Street canyon with its faceless aluminium goddess of grain.
Across the river the Main Post Office (1932) stretches along Van Buren Street, and the walk ends at One North LaSalle (1930), a 49-storey setback tower at Madison Street.
How to do it
On foot, six stops, 4 kilometres measured on the streets, about three and a half hours. The Loop is flat and the route can be walked in either direction.
When to go
Weekdays, when the lobbies are open. At weekends several of them are closed.
Read the article
The magazine has a longer piece on this walk, with a photograph of each building and the history behind it: Art Deco in Chicago, six buildings in the Loop.
Step by step
Riverside Plaza (1929), Chicago, Illinois
Completed in June 1929 as the Chicago Daily News Building, Riverside Plaza on the south bank of the Chicago River was designed by Holabird & Root as an Art…
Bankers Building (1927), Chicago
A 41-story Art Deco tower by the Burnham Brothers on West Adams Street, built in 1927 when Chicago's Loop was still defining the American skyscraper — one of…
Field Building
At 45 floors and 535 feet, the Field Building was the last major office skyscraper erected in Chicago before the construction hiatus of the Depression and…
Chicago Board of Trade Building
A 44-storey Art Deco tower closing the LaSalle Street canyon, crowned by a faceless aluminium goddess of grain who has watched over Chicago's markets since…
Chicago Main Post Office (1932), 433 West Van Buren Street, Chicago, Illinois
The Chicago Main Post Office is the kind of building that makes you recalibrate your sense of scale. Straddling the Eisenhower Expressway and occupying an…
One North LaSalle Street Building (1930), 1 North LaSalle Street, Chicago Loop, Illinois
A 49-story Art Deco tower at the intersection of LaSalle and Madison Streets in the Chicago Loop — one of the city's most refined exercises in the setback…
Download for tour navigation
PDF is the stop list with GPS, to print or keep on the phone. GPX for Garmin / Komoot / OsmAnd. KML for Google Earth and Maps.
Walk it with the navigator on
It opens in the Google Maps app with every stop already loaded, in the order we put them in. From there the route is yours: pick how you travel — on foot, by bike, by public transport or by car — change where you start and where you end, drag the stops into a different order, and add places of your own along the way.
To keep the route in the app instead of opening it once, download the KML above and import it into Google My Maps — Create a new map, then Import: the route then sits among your own maps in Google Maps, with the stops and our notes attached to each one.