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  The best self‑guided walking tours for newcomers in Chicago If you’re new to Chicago and eager to explore the city beyond the usual tourist snapshots,  CityWalksSpaces  collection of 13 self‑guided walking tours  offers one of the most thoughtful and practical introductions to the city, making it an ideal starting point for anyone wanting to understand Chicago’s character, history, and neighborhoods on foot. Why these walks are perfect for newcomers in Chicago? 1. A friendly introduction to Chicago’s story Before you even start walking, the site provides a rich, accessible overview of Chicago’s origins—from Jean Baptiste Point du Sable’s first settlement to the city’s explosive growth after the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the rebuilding that followed the Great Fire of 1871. This context helps newcomers appreciate the layers of history they’ll encounter on each route. 2. Practical tips for navigating the city Chicago can feel overwhelmin...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) The H. Washington Public Library, Chicago When you see it from the street, it appears as a huge cube of granite and red bricks, an imposing but somewhat dull building that occupies an entire city block. You will have to look up at its roof to see original metal decorations that may begin to arouse your curiosity. They are owls, symbols of the wisdom that awaits you inside. Once you have pushed open its entrance doors, you can only be amazed by the splendor of the place. The terrazzo floors are superb, the geometric decorations echo the geometric layout of the place, the escalators in wooden structures make you want to take them instead of the elevator. Each floor has its specialty, its worktables, its particular lighting, its art exhibitions and without having to borrow books, you can easily spend an hour there looking at everything. Do not miss the glass roof/winter garden on the 9th floor, a calm and bright place where you can find armchairs to s...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) The 37 iconic Chicago bridges Chicago is a city of about two and a half million people and even if they are not all concentrated in the city center, it is easy to imagine that there is a lot of traffic there. However, about forty times a year between April and November and except during rush hour, this traffic stops from one street to another along the river. This is the time when the bascule bridges open to let pass sailboats and other large boats that want to go on the lake from their garages or come back. This has been going on for almost two hundred years because the first Chicago bridge, made of wood, was built in 1834. In the past, each had an operator day and night in towers located at their entrance because boats could request passage at any time and had precedence over road traffic. There were 37 such bridges along the Calumet and Chicago rivers but today, they are not all in operation because river traffic is now limited to construction b...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) Chicago Smart Museum of Art and site of the 1st nuclear chain reaction There are often small contemporary art museums here and there that are overshadowed by larger, better-known ones but still turn out to be great discoveries. The Chicago Smart Museum of Art is one of them. Located as is often the case on the campus of a university, here the University of Chicago in the Hyde Park neighborhood, the modernist building that houses it immediately gives an idea of ​​what you will find inside: modern and contemporary art but also Asian art and European art from before 1900. This museum opened in the 1960s thanks to a donation from the Smart family, magazine publishers and documentary film producers. It has several thousand pieces collected over the years thanks to various donations and it is intended as much for the education of students on campus as for the general public. Its entry is therefore free, and you will spend about an hour visiting its exhib...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) Chicago boulevards When you arrive in Chicago and start driving through the suburbs, you will quickly notice these huge boulevards with their central two-lane arteries and the adjacent lanes on each side, all planted with trees and lined with magnificent mansions. Built over about 7 decades since the 1870s and intended to justify Chicago's motto (Urbs in horto - the city in the garden), it now gives a particular character to the city and especially to its neighborhoods far from the center; they are thus connected by greenways where residents can go running and/or enjoy the lawns to relax when the weather is nice. They also provide access to a whole set of landscaped parks, often with recreation pavilions, small lakes, beaches, and sports fields. The system is in fact so original that it has been classified as a historic monument since 2018 for at least forty kilometers. As it was developed, it attracted wealthy families who settled on its banks in ...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) Chinatown Chicago Chinatown Chicago is one of the largest Chinese communities in the United States and continues to welcome new immigrants, making it one of the most authentic in the country. Founded in the 1912s by the powerful Merchants' Association to escape the discrimination that the Chinese population was beginning to feel in the city center, the neighborhood was limited in its development following racial tensions with other adjacent communities. This makes it an easy place to explore on foot, filled with shops with colorful signs that are impossible to read if you don't know the language, and a constant buzz of activity on its two main streets. If you want spices, vegetables, cakes or clothes that you can't find anywhere else, this is the place to go, as well as a newer pedestrian complex where you'll find shops on two floors and of course, everywhere, architecture and patterns reminiscent of China. A cha...

 King Drive, Bronzeville (texte en français ci-dessous) Perhaps one of the best ways to experience Bronzeville, Chicago's historic black neighborhood, is to walk along Martin Luther King Jr. Drive from its intersection with E 47th St to its intersection with E 32nd St. In the span of 14 blocks and with detours along S Calumet Ave, you will have explored much of its cultural and activist heritage and, with any luck, had the chance to chat with some of its residents who will tell you more about the place. This is what the self-guided Walk in Chicago # 12 offers you to do (see link below), adding a final section towards the Illinois Institute of Technology and its modernist architecture. King Drive, as the boulevard is now known, was once called Grand Boulevard and when you stroll along some of the 19th century Victorian mansions that line it, you’ll understand why. It’s also the heart of Bronzeville, the black metropolis that had its heyday in the 1930s. Y...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) Graceland Cemetery, serene but hunted? It is at Graceland Cemetery, a large rural cemetery north of Chicago, that many of the people who shaped the city are buried. Designed as a park preserving natural places, there are so many different trees surrounding the graves that it has become an arboretum and therefore a serene place quite suitable for walking. At the beginning of the 20th century, moreover, there were so many visitors that entries were limited to Sundays and public holidays unless you had a pass. Little by little, however, the fashion for coming there faded and the paths have now regained their calm. In any case, it is an astonishing and very romantic place on the edge of small Willowmere Lake which is located at its northern end, where the most extravagant tombs of the place are also concentrated, often designed by famous architects. Some rest not far from their creations, by the way. If you arrive through the main entrance which is loc...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) Chicago monumental sculptures When, around you, there are only skyscrapers, each one taller and more beautiful than the other, one solution, if you want to decorate the public spaces at their feet, is to order monumental abstract sculptures This is what architects, decision-makers and various commissions did in some places in Chicago starting in the 1960s, hence replacing the traditional commemorative sculptures with more modern and unexpected works. A walk in the Loop is therefore an opportunity for original artistic discoveries, and here is a sample of what you can see on your way if you follow one or more of the four Walks in Chicago which explore the city center: The first photo is undoubtedly the city's most famous monumental sculpture, the Cloud Gate, commonly nicknamed the Bean. It is located in Millennium Park and was designed by Anish Kapoor. Its creation was a technical feat and when you go there, don't forget to ...

  (texte en français ci-desssous) Marina City Chicago Marina City Chicago is located along the Riverwalk in Chicago and you can't miss it. First of all, it is the sight of cars stored on 19 floors in alcoves that is astonishing. There is color, joy and imagination there and it makes you forget the gray and somewhat dated appearance of the two 65-story round towers which form the main part of the complex. Higher up, semi-circular projections all around and on all floors are reminiscent of gigantic ears of corn and this is another remarkable feature. What is less surprising, however, is the extensive use of reinforced concrete. This allowed these two towers to be the tallest in the world made in this way during their inauguration, but it is a material that ages poorly and the modernity of the time is substituted today by thinner and lighter glass structures with steel. The whole complex, however, remains a masterpiece of creativity, undoubtedly because its shape and its location ecli...

  (texte en français ci-dessous) History of Wooden Alley, Chicago Gold Coast neighborhood Wooden Alley is the only still clearly visible wooden alley that remains over the hundreds of kilometers that had been paved in this way in Chicago in the 19th century. It is in the Gold Coast neighborhood between N. Astor St and N. State. At the time, Chicago, built on marshes and nicknamed the muddy city, needed a solution to make its streets functional and avoid diseases born from its swampy conditions. Wood, abundant in the region, was also cheaper than stone and paving technique using this material had been invented in Boston in the 1850s. There was in fact a whole series of measures to make the city a healthier place and one was to raise the streets and put wooden boards on them, then paving them with wood when it turned out to be more solid. This survivor dates from 1909 when the practice began to disappear because of its prohibitive cost as the forests around had been ...