The 57-acre Museum Campus, one of Chicago’s most recent lakefront attractions, unites three of the city’s oldest institutions. Located at the southern edge of Grant Park, it opened in 1998 after the city rerouted the northbound lanes of heavily trafficked Lake Shore Drive and replaced the asphalt with terraced gardens and broad walkways connecting the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium and the Field Museum.
Opened in 1930 thanks to the munificence of John G. Shedd, the stock clerk who became president of Marshall Field and Co., the Shedd is one of the oldest aquariums in the world and was only recently surpassed as the largest one indoors. The extensive facility and its five million gallons of water are home to 22,000 animals—over one million, the staff will tell you, if you count all those tiny coral polyps. They come in dizzying variety, with sharks and rays, frogfish and parrotfish, and an octogenarian Australian lungfish named ‘Granddad’, the oldest fish in any aquarium anywhere. Among the more recent additions are the Oceanarium, with its belugas, otters and other mammals, and the Wild Reef exhibit, which provides diver’s-eye views of sharks through 12-foot-high curved windows.
At the end of a long jetty east of the aquarium, the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum offers explorations of the heavens in the original Zeiss Sky Theater and the state-of-the-art virtual-reality StarRider Theater. Built in 1930 as the first modern planetarium in the Western Hemisphere by Max Adler, another philanthropist who made his fortune in retail, it is also home to one of the world’s finest collections of astronomical instruments and rare books. At certain times of the year, the Adler gives the public the chance to view planets and lunar eclipses through telescopes set up on the grounds.
Established in 1893, the Field Museum was funded by Marshall Field, founder of a legendary department store in Chicago. The museum’s encyclopedic collection covers subjects as wide-ranging as evolution, ancient Egyptian funerary customs and Plains Indian life, but the most famous of its holdings is Sue, the world’s biggest and best-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex.
If a full tour of the Museum Campus leaves you feeling drained, you can recharge with a leisurely lake cruise in the summer (cruises board near the aquarium), a Bears game during the National Football League season (Soldier Field is just to the south) or simply marvel at Chicago’s skyline from the steps of the Field Museum, or any of the other superb vantage points.
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