(gentle music) (gentle music) (water splashing) - [Geoffrey] Chicago is home to so much beauty, natural and human-made.

How could we possibly fit it all into one show?

- I'm Geoffrey Baer, and the answer is, we couldn't.

So I'm back with more.

- [Geoffrey] In this follow-up to an earlier program, which by the way, you can stream or watch online anytime, we meet more folks who show us some of their favorite beautiful places and things in Chicago and the suburbs.

- As artists, we always wanna make beautiful things.

- To me, when it's terrible down there, it's potentially beautiful above.

- Oh, look, there's a cat bird, they sound like cats.

- [Geoffrey] And I'll add more of my favorites too.

- This building was gonna be destroyed.

I mean, can you believe that?

- [Geoffrey] Some are iconic.

Some you might never have seen or even heard of.

- Did he do everything?

- Pretty much everything.

- [Geoffrey] All have meaning and stories that prove their beauty is way more than skin deep.

- It is really a spectacular building.

You are like a gladiator.

- Come along with me as we discover more of the most beautiful places in Chicago.

(grand orchestral music fades) would have to include this place, Millennium Park and we'll explore it later in the show.

But first, let's go back in time on this very spot.

- [Geoffrey] It's hard to believe that for almost a century what is now Millennium Park was a huge railroad yard right on our prized downtown lakefront.

The rail yard wasn't very beautiful, but it inspired something beautiful across the street.

The Chicago Cultural Center, built as the Chicago Public Library in 1897.

The walls inside are encrusted with mosaic tiles in swirling designs, framing the names of famous authors.

And quotes in many world languages.

So how did the old railroad yard across the street inspire these mosaics?

Well, those steam trains spewed tons of soot into the air that settled in thick layers inside the library.

So mosaic tile was chosen for the decor in part because it was easy to clean.

The walls sparkle as you move past them.

The effect was created by laying the tiles at odd angles, part of an ancient technique called Cosmati work.

Climbing the marble stairs, you emerge into the former main hall of the library beneath the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world.

(gentle music) - Am I telling you or what?

- [Geoffrey] But wait, there's another dome in the Cultural Center.

It's in a part of the former library dedicated to veterans of the Union Army and the Civil War called the Grand Army of the Republic, or the G-A-R.

It was magnificently restored in 2022.

Renowned Chicago restoration architect, Gunny Harboe led the effort.

- So you got the call to do this job.

Were you thrilled?

Were you scared outta your mind?

- Well, yeah, a little bit scared, but I mean, that's what we love to do.

The dome was covered over in the late 20s, early 30s, and they put concrete, precast concrete elements because it had always leaked probably and they covered it up.

- [Geoffrey] Daylight was replaced by ugly dull fluorescent lighting beneath the concrete dome.

To restore the dome, Harboe enlisted Chicago's Daprato Rigali Studios which has been in the stained glass business since 1860.

- [Gunny] They completely removed all its pieces.

They had to build custom crates and each one of these panels came out, went in the crate and went to their studio, and once they got there, first they did rubbings of everything, photographs.

Then they would lay it on a bench, and then once they'd documented it completely, then they'd take it all apart.

They'd put it in a big bath and they washed every single piece by hand.

- [Geoffrey] Every single glass?

- [Gunny] Yeah, yeah, all 60,000 plus whatever, however the number is.

So they were able to have it sing again the way it is.

It's really beautiful.

- [Geoffrey] But the dome was only part of the challenge.

The project involved restoring the entire Tiffany-designed hall to its former glory.

- What condition was this place in when you got started?

- All these rooms had been renovated in the 1970s.

- [Geoffrey] Renovated.

- Yeah.

And all the things, everywhere where you see this beautiful green, and in the other room, that deep red that had all been painted over with kind of a off-white, gray color sort of.

- [Geoffrey] Restoring colors, typically involves repainting surfaces to replicate the original.

But here, thanks to a remarkable discovery, Harboe was able to unearth the original finishes for the first time in his career.

- We spent about a year in discovery, in research, and we were able to see that you could remove this overburden paint and then this green paint, and then the other room, the red paint, it was there.

And that was like, whoa.

But of course, all that paint had to be removed.

That was the herculean task of the crew that was in here for six months.

They found they could cleave off the later paint and it would leave the original surface there.

And then they could touch that up like you would to an actual painting.

I mean, when you're looking at this thing, you are seeing pretty much what it was when it was first done and that's unusual, very unusual.

In 30 plus years, I've never had a project where we were able to really conserve original surfaces in the manner we did this.

- [Geoffrey] You've done a lot of restoration, but this job actually has some personal meaning for you.

- [Gunny] I didn't realize it at the beginning, but it was a revelation during the course of the thing and what was the key is in that room, there's this big ornamental medallion on the wall.

The medal, and I thought, that looks familiar to me.

And I knew I had this, which is the G-A-R pin that my great-grandfather and my namesake, and he served in the Civil War.

He was mustered three times.

The first time he was 16 and a half, and finally near the end of the war is when he actually served.

- [Geoffrey] There is this period in the history of a building where it's not quite old enough to be historic yet.

It just seems old and isn't that when buildings are really at risk?

- Yeah, this building was gonna be destroyed.

I mean, can you believe that?

Yeah, but it's true.

- [Geoffrey] What have we preserved by not tearing it down?

- [Gunny] Well, if you just look around, I mean, you come into this space.

I mean, if you sat here during the day and watch people's reaction walking in here, they almost all fall over.

Your body reacts in a way that is beyond your consciousness.

- [Geoffrey] And maybe this glorious restoration will hit visitors on an even deeper level.

Drawn here by the newly restored beauty, they might think about, even feel the sacrifice of those who fought to end slavery and restore the Union.

(gentle music) The Cultural Center sets a high bar for ornamental artistry, but that's a challenge others have risen to all over the city.

Pui Tak Center in Chinatown reflects the community's pride as it migrated here from an earlier Chinatown in the Loop.

Laramie State Bank in Austin is a personal favorite of mine.

This little known landmark is covered in playful yellow terracotta ornament representing banking, including coins, busy bees, thrifty squirrels, and more.

It's been vacant since a 2012 foreclosure, but there are plans to redevelop it as a mixed-use community center.

Reebie Storage in Lincoln Park is decorated in pseudo-Egyptian ornament reflecting the Egyptomania craze after a University of Chicago archeologist helped excavate King Tut's tomb in 1922.

This sparkling mosaic sends a message to motorists exiting Lake Shore Drive at Foster Avenue, that Native Americans are alive and well and living in Chicago.

It's called Indian Land Dancing.

- [Geoffrey] What does that mean, Indian Land Dancing?

- It means that the land is alive, that we're all a part of it and you need to listen to the earth and hear her dancing and to join in that dance.

- [Geoffrey] That's Chris Pappan.

He and his wife Debra are artists and part of Chicago's Native American community that created the mosaic.

But the idea for the work came from the local alderman who enlisted a public art group with no indigenous members.

So they had to build trust.

- Before they took that step in designing or thinking about what the design was going to be, they reached out to the Native American community and invited many of the leaders and community members to come to a meeting so that we were aware of what was going on.

- [Geoffrey] The Chicago Public Art Group's Tracy Van Duinen was one of the project's leaders.

- [Tracy] It wasn't just artists that were meeting.

We had historians, activists.

- [Debra] Elders.

- [Tracy] Elders, yeah.

- [Debra] A lot of youth as well.

- [Tracy] Yeah, involved in it.

And really guiding how this came to be.

- [Debra] What I really appreciate is how much they understood that this could not be a story that they could tell, but it was something that had to be told by native people.

- [Geoffrey] So what do you see when native people are not involved in Native American art?

- Oh, it's always glaringly obvious to native people that it's misinformed.

- [Debra] It doesn't help that they're all of these statues and monuments and a particular sports team that still carry on.

- [Geoffrey] The hockey team.

- [Debra] The hockey team that carries on a stereotypical image.

Chris and I literally have heard people say this in front of us, that native people are all gone.

They don't exist anymore, and we're standing right there.

- This mural was a way to fight against that, to re-educate people, hopefully.

The mural actually is in two parts.

So there's the south side, which is more about history of native people in this area and native people in general, and the north side, which is about us as contemporary people.

So on the north side, you'll have skateboarders and iron workers and families that grew up here.

- [Geoffrey] What are the materials we're seeing in here?

- [Tracy] There's ceramic tile, painting, sculpted cement and mirrors, yeah.

- [Chris] Mirrors and the photo tile.

- [Tracy] And photo transfer tile, yeah.

- [Geoffrey] So how did you do it?

Like what did you do physically to put it all up there?

- The fun part was breaking a lot of the tile.

So, they had a truckload of boxes of unbroken tile and so part of that job was taking little hammers and just like breaking that tile into smaller pieces.

I think as artists, we always want to make beautiful things, or at least I do, personally, and I feel like we made a really beautiful thing here, and the beauty is not just the visual piece that we created.

The beauty is in the process, in the people we were able to meet throughout this and create new relationships with.

And hopefully, that helps people become more aware of us and who we are and things that we care about.

- [Geoffrey] Artists have adorned walls all over Chicago to beautify the city and raise the consciousness of its citizens.

Pilsen's famous murals are rooted in the Mexican tradition of political agitation through paint.

One of the newest is by muralist Mauricio Ramirez.

- [Mauricio] I wanted to create a piece of work that spoke to the community directly by creating a homage to the Aztec Eagle Warrior muralist in the past, but also, kind of create some sort of a Aztec hero.

Pilsen's changing and there's a lot of weird things that are happening, like gentrification's one, and I feel like there should be some sort of cultural historical piece to counteract that.

- [Geoffrey] The South Loop is an urban canvas for muralists.

Columbia College, which specializes in creative arts and media dreamed up the Wabash Arts Corridor in 2013, and claims it's one of America's largest public art programs.

Murals even brighten up the gloomy viaducts beneath the Illinois central tracks in Hyde Park.

Some dating from the 1970s are by Chicago's first female muralists.

This was among the earliest works of the Chicago Public Art Group.

There's a mural inside this Bronzeville building that Chicago urban historian, Shermann "Dilla" Thomas wants to make sure we know about.

- [Shermann] This mural was done by William Edouard Scott, right, the French middle name.

This mural depicts the black metropolis here in Chicago that a person would discover once they were arriving here from the south via the Great Migration.

But also, what I think about, right, is that he painted this mural in 1936 and so that's roughly about 70 years after the end of chattel slavery in this country.

And yet he's able to depict all of the things that African Americans have been able to contribute and participate in only having been out of slavery 70 years.

That's quite amazing, right?

I love that there is a gentleman holding a airplane.

African Americans were involved with flight, right?

And of course, African Americans have contributed greatly to the athletics in this country.

Jesse Owens made us proud when he defeated the Germans in Berlin.

Maybe that's a early depiction of what Tiger Woods was going to be, right?

Maybe he had a crystal ball.

I love that it shows that African Americans are, and were educated, right.

There's a person graduating.

There are people depicting the sciences.

There are people depicting medicine, which is very appropriate since African Americans in Chicago performed the first successful open heart surgery.

So, it's an amazing, amazing piece.

Also, a sense of pride, right?

To be able to face adversity and obstacles and overcome 'em and still be able to move forward, right, not only for yourself and your family, but your whole culture and your whole race.

- [Geoffrey] Beyond the mural, the building itself has an important history.

It was the first YMCA to admit African Americans.

- [Shermann] This building is the birthplace of the concept for Black History Month.

In 1926, Dr. Carter G. Woodson, he set up an association, right?

It was called the Association of the Study of Negro Life and History.

That concept, the organizational meetings happen not only in this building, but in this room.

- Right here.

- Right here.

- Wow.

[Geoffrey] Why don't more people know about it?

- [Shermann] The first answer would be that for about 30, 40 years, this mural was covered up inside of this building.

But then I also don't think we do a very good job in this city of sharing our shared history, right?

We all know the story of the Picasso in front of the Daley Center and the story of Mr. William Edouard Scott's mural at the black Wabash YMCA.

That should be just as common as the story of the Picasso.

(birds chirping) - [Geoffrey] In Chicago's Gilded Age, at the end of the 1800s, this street, Prairie Avenue, in what is now Chicago's South Loop, was the city's Gold Coast.

Home to sleeping car manufacturer, George Pullman, merchant prince, Marshall Field, and meat packer, Philip Armour.

- But when this fortress-like house went up right here at the corner of 18th and Prairie in 1886, the neighbors didn't know what to make of it.

- [Geoffrey] The radical Romanesque design was Boston architect H.H Richardson's response to the homeowner's wish to be trendsetters.

Farm machine magnate John Glessner and his wife Francis, furnished the home in arts and craft style, which was considered the cutting edge in its day with gorgeous upholstery and wall coverings by the renowned British designer, William Morris.

- [Geoffrey] The Glessners weren't as wealthy as some of their Gilded Age neighbors, but they did have a few amenities, like a staff of eight servants.

They could ring for them using this call box in the kitchen.

(bell ringing) Oh, looks like Mrs. Glessner needs us in the parlor.

(call box clicking) - [Geoffrey] The servants lived in modest rooms and quietly circulated in hidden hallways.

The Glessners recorded the most minute details of their privileged lives in daily journals.

Their son John was an avid photographer and documented every room.

As a result, now that the house has been restored as a museum after decades of neighborhood decline, it looks almost exactly as it did when the Glessners lived here, including much of the original furnishings, which were returned by the Glessners' heirs.

- A few pianists you might have heard of entertained the Glessners on this magnificent Steinway piano with a custom-made case.

Let's see, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Paderewski.

After the Glessners passed away, the piano was donated to their good friend, the president of Harvard University.

Harvard donated it back to the Glessner House in 1980.

Let's see how it sounds.

(Geoffrey sighs) (piano music) I don't play Rachmaninoff.

- [Geoffrey] Here's another house that baffled the neighbors, the Ruth and Sam Ford House in Aurora by architect Bruce Goff.

In fact, when it was under construction, the owners erected this sign on the front lawn that read, "We don't like your House either."

That's the home's longtime owner, Sid Robinson.

- Goff is known for using unusual materials.

Materials other architects wouldn't have thought of.

- [Geoffrey] He's not kidding.

Materials include rope and discarded chunks of glass.

The skylight in the bathroom is a recycled dome from a World War II bomber, and one wall is made of coal.

Not surprisingly, the architect was as unusual as the house.

Goff was a prodigy.

He designed his first home at age 14.

- [Geoffrey] Where did the architect of this place go to architecture school?

That's a setup.

- Well, he didn't.

He went through high school only.

- Only a high school education.

- Yes, and he learned architecture by working in a firm in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

- [Geoffrey] You could get credentials just by working.

- [Sid] By working, grandfathered in.

When architecture graduate students come and visit the house, I try not to discourage them by saying that the architect of this house never went beyond high school.

- [Geoffrey] And so Goff was just obviously very intuitive?

- [Sid] Yes, and he liked to work with shapes.

- [Geoffrey] The house was commissioned in 1947 by Ruth Van Sickle Ford.

She wanted it not only as a home, but as a bit of self-promotion.

- So Ruth Ford owned this art school in downtown Chicago, which is where she met Goff 'cause he taught for her and she wanted to make a trophy house to advertise her school.

- This one.

- And this was the house.

So she made sure it got into Life Magazine in 1951.

- [Geoffrey] Yeah, there it is.

And was it a pretty good propaganda job in here?

- [Sid] I've never understood what the consequences were of whether this made a difference or not.

- [Geoffrey] Yeah, but it made a difference in the traffic outside.

- [Sid] Oh, it certainly did.

After this was printed, on Sunday afternoons, they had to have a traffic cop around the block because of all the curiosity.

- So many people wanted to come.

- [Geoffrey] Ruth felt the house really did bring notoriety to the Chicago Academy of Fine Art, where she was president and director for more than 20 years.

But the house was more than a publicity stunt.

She worked closely with the architect to make sure it perfectly suited her lifestyle and work.

That wall made of coal was a gallery where Ford's watercolors popped against the black background.

The quiet space upstairs was her studio.

And, as one of the few women to lead a prestigious art school at the time, she wanted a great place for entertaining.

- [Sid] Goff was very responsive to clients.

She liked to have her guests not separated from her when she was cooking.

Her mother lived with them for one year.

So the two bedrooms are completely separate with their own bathrooms.

- [Geoffrey] When I look at this house, it feels like it's modern and it's primitive.

- [Sid] Yes, I mean, when you think about a roundhouse with a fireplace in the middle, that's a primordial human habitation.

I mean, you think of igloos and yurts and teepees and so on.

I mean, that's the way you would conserve heat and so on.

So this house is based on an ancient idea of habitation, but it's a very contemporary house.

- [Geoffrey] How do you think of the beauty in the context of this house?

- [Sid] That's a good question because beauty is such a slippery concept, and I like to think it has two aspects.

It has the circular geometry, which is very calming, and the stimulation of the textures and the colors.

So it's beauty that's active and beauty that's quiet.

- Oh, that's nice, and I was gonna say that's beautiful.

- In the same building, yes.

- [Geoffrey] Hidden behind this hand-carved door in Old Town is a so-called handmade house by artist Edgar Miller created in the 1920s and 30s.

It exudes creativity and delight everywhere you look.

If you're starting to see a theme here, you're right.

Houses built not just as shelter, but as immersive works of art.

- [Geoffrey] Oh man.

All right, so as I've walked up through this house, I have seen stained glass, hand-carved wood, ceramics.

Did he do everything?

- Pretty much everything.

Edgar Miller worked in over 30 mediums.

He could lay brick, plaster, really a true Renaissance man.

- [Geoffrey] Zac Bleicher lives in the house, which was meticulously restored in the early 2000s by his late uncle who knew Edgar Miller personally.

- There were a lot of different types of creatives that came to these spaces and so it became an artist colony.

He did enjoy playing games, having fun, probably drinking scotch and smoking cigars.

- [Geoffrey] During prohibition.

- [Zac] During prohibition, of course.

This was a pretty avant-garde scene of people who were not interested in the more sort of conservative morays of the time.

- And I'm seeing a lot of animals.

- [Zac] Of course, yeah.

So Miller's work highly influenced by animals because he grew up in Idaho on the frontier.

He had an affinity to them.

We noticed that the human figures in Miller's art always seem a little bit awkward, or cubist, or chunkier.

They're not as detailed as the animals.

- [Geoffrey] The more you look at it, the more detail you see.

Like at first I thought maybe that was just a little dirt.

That's not dirt, that's like a little shading that was done, right?

- [Zac] And many times, even in that case, Miller probably used his fingers and his thumb to actually smear the enamel onto the stained glass before it was fired.

- I'm touching what Edgar touched right now.

I'm channeling him, feeling the creativity.

What was his work ethic?

- [Zac] I mean, he was constantly working and quickly and he didn't really correct things.

There's sort of a roughness to his work.

He didn't do over.

He wasn't a perfectionist.

Even though, from our point of view, this looks pretty perfect.

- Yeah.

- [Geoffrey] You can see a good example of that one floor below us along the stairs.

- [Zac] He would just dive into it and be very spontaneous.

Each carve of the chisel, where he's going, he's going like this and then around.

I mean, this all was probably done in a matter of minutes.

- [Geoffrey] The three story entrance hall gave Miller space for a heroic work in plaster.

- [Zac] Each of these human figures represents a muse, music and dance.

- [Geoffrey] Oh yeah.

- [Zac] Drama.

- [Geoffrey] Yeah.

- [Zac] And at the center, Miller takes a bit of creative liberty by inventing a muse of architecture.

- Ah, yes.

- And you see the architect parting the forest with the city rising behind it.

- [Geoffrey] Oh, there's the city, right.

- [Zac] But Miller saw this space as a perfect campus.

- Oh yeah.

- [Geoffrey] The heavy beams of the ceiling in a living area seemed right for a heavy topic.

- One of the most interesting pieces is here.

It's got a bit of a dark story to it.

It's a mushroom cloud.

- [Geoffrey] Oh, yes it is.

- [Zac] And it says at the bottom, AD 1945.

Embedded in this ceiling is the history of science and technology.

You see Leonardo and Galileo, all the way back to the Greek philosophers.

So there's 60 total images all carved in wood.

- Look around you.

Why isn't Edgar Miller world famous?

- I mean, it's a question that's asked all the time.

You see his work and you immediately think, this artist is a genius.

His work happens to be also in all these private spaces.

And so, it was much harder to see his work in person unless you happen to get invited to a party at this house.

- [Geoffrey] For those not lucky enough to score one of those invitations, Zac has co-founded a nonprofit to keep Edgar Miller's message alive.

- [Zac] Miller has a great quote where he said that, "To be afraid of inspiration is like being afraid to eat."

You have to have inspiration in order to continue making your art and to live.

- [Geoffrey] Here's a building that's clearly designed to inspire, Chicago Vocational High School.

One proud alum, Lee Bey, grew up to be an author, photographer, and architecture critic.

- It is really a spectacular building with the finest non skyscraper art deco, art motor and building that you will see in this county, I think.

- Wow, that is a hell of an entrance, right there.

- [Lee] It is, you go up those stairs, you feel like you're going into something momentous.

- [Geoffrey] Yeah, there's like an effect of that.

If you're a kid walking up to this school, right.

If you're a potential student, you're a freshman, it's your first day of school.

I mean, that's sending you a message - Oh yeah, that you are coming to someplace important and you are like a gladiator coming in and up those stairs to do that, and it just underscores the importance of education and I'll even go one step, the importance of education to a working class community.

That we're not gonna build you a barn or a box or things like a warehouse, but we're gonna give you something that brings class and beauty to the things that you're gonna learn.

- [Geoffrey] And so what was the function of this school?

- The function of this school, going back to the origins of it, right.

So built in 1941.

- [Geoffrey] 38, it says right there.

- [Lee] Well see, that's not right.

- It's not?

- Its not right, no.

- It's not right.

- No, it was supposed to be built in '38.

They didn't build until '41.

The school leaders and the city leaders, they saw accurately the 20th century as one that was increasingly mechanized, right.

So the idea here on the southeast side, which still is, which was especially then industrial, the idea was to create a school for boys that would prepare them for that future.

There was a wood shop.

Then, there was auto shop.

Metal shop, I mean, I'm preparing people for jobs.

The tops of the columns are each marked by some vocation that was taught here.

You got bricklaying as number two.

Architecture actually is number one.

It's T square and a column and half of an arch.

- [Geoffrey] There's a drill press and a bandsaw up there.

And what was your trade that you learned?

- [Lee] Mine was print shop.

So I learned to operate a printing press.

- [Geoffrey] Now I think that's kind of an interesting thing.

Your trade was printing and you became a book author.

- [Lee] It's funny how life is, right.

I mean, and in fact the bug for writing was born here.

In my senior year, my English teacher, Tom Doyle said, "You write well, did you ever think about journalism?"

- [Geoffrey] And Lee's journalism career eventually brought him full circle.

- [Lee] Wrote a book about the architecture of the south side because I thought south side architecture was overlooked and I included this school in it.

And we can be honest, there's reasons of race behind much of this.

The city is, I mean, you look at tourist maps, particularly historic ones.

The rest of the city is taught not to go far south.

As a result, this wealth of architecture, schools, churches, buildings, park space, has been largely overlooked by the rest of the city.

- [Geoffrey] Lee says, a glaring example is the story of two identical high schools by architect Dwight Perkins, one on the north side and one on the south.

The north side school, Carl Schurz has been a city landmark since 1979.

- Bowen High School, its twin, they opened the same day on the same year by the same architect and they look just alike.

- [Geoffrey] And it's not landmarked?

- [Lee] And it's not landmarked.

Not only is it not landmarked, but as the book mentions, when the city is making the case for landmarking, Schurz on the north side, they list other Dwight Perkins buildings and don't list Bowen.

- [Geoffrey] It's twin.

- [Lee] Which is twin, yeah.

- [Geoffrey] Well, that really tells, that tells you something.

- [Lee] That tells a story, right.

I mean, if that building can be overlooked and it has a twin, then any building can be overlooked.

- [Geoffrey] Lee has photographed and documented dozens of south side gems, like Liberty Baptist Church in Bronzeville, Pride Cleaners in Chatham with its swoopy swinging 60s roofline, and striking homes of every style, including this Japanese-inspired summer cottage by Frank Lloyd Wright in West Pullman.

Lee says, even some buildings by Chicago's most famous architects, like Jeanne Gang's Lavezzorio Community Center in Auburn Gresham don't get the attention of buildings by those same architects downtown and on the north side.

- South side architecture not overlooked by the people, the 700,000 people who live here obviously.

- [Geoffrey] 700,000.

- Yeah, I mean it's a city within the city and it's just now being seen because younger generations and the people like myself, who are writing about this thing are kind of pushing people, go see this stuff, it's worthy of the trip.

- [Geoffrey] Chicago's motto is Urbs in Horto, Latin for city in a garden.

So it's not surprising that some of our most beautiful places are wonders of nature.

- We're kind of entering the prairie habitat now and let's kind of use our binoculars on the left side of the trail here, there are two birds.

You see the tall yellow flowers?

- You already see a bird?

- Yes.

- Oh, oh, I see it.

- [Geoffrey] But city dwellers haven't always had equal access to nature.

Ecologist and conservation biologist Deja Perkins is out to change that in places like Jackson Park on the south side.

- [Geoffrey] And we're in the middle of the city.

- In the middle of the city.

- And that's really important to you, right?

- It is, it is.

Because not everybody has access to nature.

A lot of the green spaces and large parks that we have, they're either further north or they're more located in the suburbs and so, this is kind of one of the closest areas.

Oh look, there's a cat bird just sat on top of the nest box there.

Yes, it's sitting there on top.

- [Geoffrey] Its a little gray bird.

- [Deja] That is a gray cat bird.

- You could tell that was a cat bird without your binocular.

- Yes, I have been doing this for a long time.

But cat birds are so cool because they sound like cats when they call- - All right, what do they sound like?

- They'd have this little, meow sound.

- So you grew up in the city.

- Yes, I grew up about 10 minutes from here.

- [Geoffrey] So what was your understanding of nature when you were growing up, when you were a little kid?

- [Deja] Yeah, I didn't really think nature existed in the city growing up.

I noticed that whenever I would go out to my dad's house who lived in the suburbs, that they had so many more trees and it was green everywhere and I didn't understand why.

- [Geoffrey] Years later, Deja learned the reason.

- Throughout the history of Chicago and many other cities around the US, we had a policy called redlining and they were enacting these racist policies to kind of help restrict where people could purchase homes and accumulate wealth through home ownership.

Redlining still leaves an impact today on our landscape.

- [Geoffrey] Redlining was ruled illegal decades ago.

But Deja says, according to research, formerly restricted neighborhoods still have far fewer trees, and by extension, fewer people monitoring the wildlife those trees support.

- That's kind of what I'm looking at right now with my research is what areas are we not monitoring because we use that information to make management decisions and to list species as endangered and so, if we're not capturing these spaces in our data, then we are not only leaving out important spaces for wildlife, but we're missing out on the people that live there too and the resources that they could have as well.

That's why representation is so important so that we can have more people bringing more ideas and more perspectives and ways of doing things.

And so I really want to reconnect not just black people, but like a lot of people of color with the outdoors.

- [Geoffrey] Why is it fun to look at birds and photograph them?

What is so much fun about that?

- One of the reasons why I bird or come out here to enjoy nature is because the world is so full of trouble and trauma and I come out here and just escape.

It's peaceful and that's what peace means to me.

- [Deja] Have we converted you into a birder?

- You have.

- [Deja] Good.

- I think you have actually.

- [Geoffrey] These birders are far from the first to see Jackson Park as an oasis in the city.

This park dates back to the Victorian era when Chicago's population was exploding and 19th century health crusaders believed that creating open space was literally a matter of life and death.

They convinced the city to hire the legendary designers of New York's Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Calvert Vaux to create showpiece pleasure grounds in Chicago.

Olmsted and Vaux took their inspiration from what was already here.

The swampy lakefront land became the water oriented Jackson Park woven with lagoons.

They created nearby Washington Park as a sheep meadow, where actual sheep trimmed the grass and fertilized it.

Olmsted and Vaux connected the two parks with a green strip called the Midway Plaisance, originally intended as a canal, though that feature was never built.

In addition to naturalistic wonders, Chicago's parks are home to some lovely buildings too, like this prairie style boathouse in Humboldt Park on the west side, and this medieval style former stable also in Humboldt Park.

It's now the National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture.

Although one room is dedicated to a Danish immigrant.

This is where the park's designer, legendary landscape architect Jens Jensen had his studio and drafting table, which the museum has recreated.

Garfield Park is home to what might be the grandest field house in Chicago, in Spanish baroque revival style with its imposing golden dome.

The Garfield Park Conservatory is where architecture and nature are happily married.

Although the marriage got off to a rocky start.

Jens Jensen, who designed the building, wanted a prairie waterfall at its center that both looked and sounded natural.

Each day, workers stacked the stone and each day Jensen told them to rip it out and try again.

Finally, Jensen told the stone mason to listen to Felix Mendelssohn's Spring Song on the piano.

It was an aha moment, and the next attempt gave Jensen exactly what he wanted.

But Jens Jensen's influence in Chicago goes way beyond this conservatory.

Here in Columbus Park and several other major west side parks, Jensen taught us to see the beauty in native plants that were previously dismissed as weeds.

- Well, it's kind of amazing, right?

I mean, we're standing here and it's just... - [Geoffrey] We feel like we're in nature.

- [Julia] I mean, we really are in nature.

It's incredible, there's stone and water and beautiful, lots of different plants, trees and perennials and shrubs and even the sky is kind of an element of the design.

The way the light and shadow works, it's exquisite.

Jensen felt that it should have...

He wanted to emulate the prairie landscape and he felt that a real natural prairie landscape would have a river and if you had a natural river, there should be a source to the river and so, right, exactly.

He created the stratified stone waterfalls.

- [Geoffrey] And that's just all manmade.

That was not there.

- [Julia] Right, I mean, there's a pipe and it's just the Chicago water system.

Not that different than your sink or my sink at home, but a little more involved.

- [Geoffrey] Yeah, my sink doesn't look like this.

- No, no, no.

- So he creates, literally makes a river through the park.

- Exactly, there was no natural water feature.

- [Geoffrey] This part of Illinois might not have mountains or rolling countryside, but landscape historian Julia Bachrach says Jensen saw something other landscape architects didn't.

- [Julia] What we did have was an abundant prairie.

And Jensen came in, he was a Danish immigrant, and he came here and thought this was really something wonderful that should be celebrated and so really ended up creating a style that was meant to celebrate the prairie.

A lot of people kind of liken it to what Frank Lloyd Wright did for architecture.

He was very charismatic.

He was very attractive looking, and he had a beautiful accent and kind of a twinkle in his eye.

He always came and spoke at the garden club set and that may have been also part of the key to his success.

Jens Jensen considered this his masterpiece.

Jensen said that he felt he had more successfully interpreted and celebrated the Illinois natural landscape in his design for Columbus Park than any other project he had done.

These are all ideas that we are now realizing how important they are today.

- [Geoffrey] He was way ahead of his time.

- [Julia] Yes, I mean, butterfly gardens and pollinators and worrying about all these things.

I mean, even the city of Chicago ask people, please plant native perennials in your backyard.

So these ideas that he had, they really were way ahead of their time.

- Here in this lovely hidden park, Jens Jensen's one time apprentice, Alfred Caldwell, took naturalistic design to a whole new level, literally.

- [Geoffrey] It's on top of the parking garage at Lake Point Tower.

Caldwell had a knack for embedding Eden in the city.

His masterpiece, later named for him, is this Lily Pool next door to Lincoln Park Zoo created in 1936 when Caldwell worked for the Chicago Park District.

Caldwell was a college dropout.

So despite his wealth of knowledge from years of working with Jens Jensen, he didn't have the credentials the park district required.

- [Julia] He had the lowest level job of all the Chicago Park District landscape design division.

But everyone in that department knew that he was the most talented guy on staff.

They would all stand at his drafting board to ask for advice.

- [Geoffrey] The park district wouldn't approve the plantings Caldwell wanted.

So he cashed in his own life insurance policy to purchase them.

Caldwell's vision for the Lily Pool was rooted in Jens Jensen's philosophy with a theme of melting glacial water cutting through limestone.

But just 10 years after it opened, the zoo took over the pool for its pelicans, flamingos, and other exotic birds.

As years went on, it was trampled, altered, neglected, and fell into a sorry state.

When Caldwell returned for a visit in 1990, he was heartbroken.

- What idiot chopped this up, or what idiot put this stuff in front of it?

What idiot.

The idea now is all that there is.

It's filled up with rubbishy things always, everywhere.

- [Geoffrey] The Lily Pool was lovingly restored at a cost of $2.4 million between 2000 and 2002.

Sadly, Caldwell didn't live to see it, but it lives on today as a tribute to him and for all of us to enjoy.

(soft gentle music) Now let's meet someone who waits for terrible weather to make Chicago look beautiful.

These stunning images are the signature work of photographer Peter Tsai from a perch called 360 Chicago at the top of the building, formerly known as the Hancock Center.

- To me, when it's terrible down there, it's potentially beautiful above.

- [Geoffrey] So it takes patience, right?

- [Peter] It does, it does.

- [Geoffrey] Yeah.

- [Peter] If it were easy, I wouldn't want to shoot it.

That's always been my thing.

The first time I came up, I had seen that it might be good and I gambled and I came up and it was amazing 'cause I got up here after work and I thought, oh, I'll just make a few frames, get some good shots and it was so beautiful looking and ever evolving that it became this river of fog just flowing in and out.

And so for hours, I was just entranced by it and I just kept shooting and shooting and shooting until the next thing I know I'm starving, but I can't leave 'cause I know it, I'll never see this again.

So had to stay until they closed and they kicked me out.

- [Geoffrey] Then they kicked you out.

- [Peter] Yep.

- [Geoffrey] What causes fog here on the shore of Lake Michigan?

- [Peter] Part of it's the marine layer that when the colder temperature of the lake and the warmer air of the city come in, you get that happening where the dew point changes and so depending on what's going on with that, the fog will roll in from the lake or it'll succeed back to the lake.

There has to be a good body of water.

So we're blessed in Chicago to have a nice body of water, like San Francisco, they have the same thing with fog coming in and out.

- [Geoffrey] But you also have to have skyscrapers.

- [Peter] Exactly, yeah.

(thundering) - [Geoffrey] Oh yeah.

Peter can make a thunderstorm a thing of beauty too.

(thundering) The newest chapter in Chicago's long history of innovative design is Millennium Park.

When it debuted in 2004, it redefined the idea of a public park in the 21st century.

Yes, it missed the millennium by a few years because it took a little extra time to get it right.

At first, the city planned to build what amounted to an extension of adjacent Grant Park, traditional, maybe even a little boring.

But when potential donors were shown the plans, they asked, "What millennium are we talking about?"

- To convince philanthropists to open their wallets, park planners went back to the drawing board.

They commissioned superstar artists and architects to dream up a park that would signal the dawn of a new millennium.

- [Geoffrey] Spanish architect, Jaume Plensa totally reimagined the ancient idea of a fountain.

He recruited a thousand everyday Chicagoans to be modern high-tech gargoyles.

Their towering video images spitting water from their mouths.

(water rushing) Plensa was surprised and delighted when the public decided to use his serene reflecting pool between the towers as a new urban playground.

In a secluded corner of the park, internationally acclaimed landscape and lighting designers created a futuristic work of living art composed of native plants that changed naturally with the seasons.

And the park has become home to Chicago's best loved work of public art, Cloud Gate, which we all know as the Bean, by Indian born British artist, Anish Kapoor.

It's the ultimate shiny thing luring visitors by the thousands.

But there were some bumps along the way.

The artist originally planned to ship it to Chicago, fully assembled from California via the Panama Canal, but the plan fell through, so it was delivered in pieces and assembled here.

Unfortunately, it wasn't ready for the grand opening of the park.

So to the artist's dismay, it was unveiled with the seams still visible.

Then it went back under the tent where workers smoothed out the welds as visitors watched through the windows.

If the Bean is a sort of peaceful people magnet, the park's most exuberant attraction is Pritzker Pavilion by renowned American architect Frank Gehry.

His signature swooping forms are so complex, they had to be engineered by computer software created to design fighter jets.

The concert hall quality sound system hangs from overhead lattice work that eliminates the need for view-blocking speakers on poles and creates a giant outdoor room.

- It's been said that architecture is frozen music.

Well, Frank Gehry's architecture seems to be in motion all the time.

It's the perfect frame for the music, and I've got the perfect seat.

(gentle slow music) - [Geoffrey] Sitting on the lawn with wine and cheese, listening to the Grant Park Orchestra, framed by the world famous skyline at sunset.

Ah, it's hard to imagine anything more beautiful.

(gentle music) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music continues) (gentle music fades)