Chicago Downtown - South Michigan Avenue

- Aon Center, Prudential Center, Grant Park, Millennium Park, Architecture Foundation

The South part of Michigan Avenue is the most central place to be in Chicago. It stretches from the Loop to South Loop and borders the large Grant Park to the East and is filled with beautiful historic skyscrapers and other buildings. Here you also find the Art Institutue, a huge arts museum that was voted the world's best museum recently, and a lot of sculptures. Grant Park is the largest park in central Chicago. At the lakefront of Grant Park, you find the huge and beautiful Buckingham Fountain, that changes colours after dark. The fountain is a popular tourist attraction and had an important role at the opening to the 80s comedy show "Married with Children". Millennium Park is a landscaped park that is part of Grant Park, just next to South Michigan Avenue. Here you find the famous modernist sculptures Cloud Gate, Jay Pritzker Pavilion (a futuristic shae arena for concerts), a mirroring aluminium shape, and the Crown Fountain, with it's faces appearing behind waterfalls. They are very popular tourist attractions and among locals.

Aon Center from 1973 is the most dominating skyscraper, currently the 3rd tallest in Chicago, at a height of 346m and 83 floors. For one year it was the tallest building in Chicago, 3rd tallest in the world and 2nd tallest in Chicago until 2009. The original white marble in this international style building was replaced with white granite since long ago due to Chicago's severe climate.

Prudential Center consist of One Prudential Plaza from 1955 and the posmodern, taller Two Prudential Center from 1990, that is Chicago's 6th tallest building to the top of the spire. Many classic 1920s buildings, many of them skyscrapers, can be found along S Michigan Ave; Metropolitan Tower, Chicago Hilton, Congress Hotel, Blackstone Hotel, Fine Arts Bldg, Symphony Center, Willoughby Tower, Chicago Culture Center and the Auditorium Building from 1889 (now part of Roosevelt University), designed by Louis Sullivan with the help from his then apprentice Frank Lloyd Wright. The beautiful grey skyscraper Carbide and Carbon Bldg is now the Hard Rock Hotel. Right at the southern end of the avenue, you will find the new London House hotel, situated in a historic building. The 61-storey One Museum Park from 2009 is the new landmark in the South Loop.

Chicago Architecture Foundation has their headquarters here, in a historic building opposite Grant Park. Here you can buy tickets to architecture tours or buy architecture souvenirs in the souvenir shop. Inside the building's historic, grand atrium, you will find a very large model of Chicago with all buildings, unpainted in white.

S Michigan Ave borders N Michigan Ave, also called the Magnificent Mile, where it derives at a DuSable Bridge above Chicago River.