Illinois

Chicago is where the modern skyscraper was born after the Great Fire of 1871, and it remains the best city in the world to look at buildings. The classic introduction is a Chicago Architecture Center river cruise, which reads the skyline from the water; from there the Willis Tower Skydeck and the 360 Chicago observation deck on the old Hancock building give the aerial view, and the Loop's canyons of Sullivan, Burnham, Mies van der Rohe and their successors reward slow walking. The lakefront is the city's other masterpiece: Millennium Park with Anish Kapoor's mirrored “Cloud Gate” — universally known as “The Bean” — and the Pritzker Pavilion, the free summer concerts, the Riverwalk, Navy Pier's Ferris wheel, and an eighteen-mile Lakefront Trail that runs past beaches and harbours from the north side to the south. The elevated “L” trains looping the downtown are themselves part of the experience.

Chicago's museums are world-class and unusually concentrated. The Art Institute of Chicago on Michigan Avenue is one of the finest encyclopedic art museums anywhere, celebrated for its Impressionist and Post-Impressionist holdings and for American icons such as Grant Wood's “American Gothic” and Edward Hopper's “Nighthawks.” South of the Loop the lakefront Museum Campus gathers three giants within walking distance: the Field Museum of Natural History, whose star resident is “Sue,” the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex ever found; the Shedd Aquarium; and the Adler Planetarium out on its own promontory with a postcard skyline view. Farther south in Hyde Park, the Museum of Science and Industry — housed in the only major surviving building of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition — holds a captured German U-boat and a walk-through model heart. Any one of them is a half-day; together they can fill a trip.

Chicago takes its food seriously and tribally. Deep-dish is the postcard — a buttery, high-walled pie baked for the better part of an hour at institutions like Lou Malnati's, Pequod's and Giordano's — but locals eat as much tavern-style thin crust, cut into squares, on any given weeknight. The other civic staples are the Italian beef sandwich (thin-sliced roast beef on a long roll, dipped in its own jus and topped with sweet peppers or fiery giardiniera) and the Chicago-style hot dog, dragged through the garden and, by unbreakable local law, never touched by ketchup. Beyond the icons the city eats globally and superbly: the taquerías and Mexican bakeries of Pilsen, the dim sum of Chinatown, the South Asian sweet shops of Devon Avenue, the Polish delis of the northwest side, and a fine-dining scene that has long punched among America's best. Come hungry and eat by neighbourhood.

Chicago electrified the blues — the Delta sound plugged in on the South and West Sides in the 1940s and 50s and became the Chicago blues that shaped rock and roll, recorded at the legendary Chess Records studio now open as a small museum. The living scene still plays nightly at rooms like Kingston Mines and Buddy Guy's Legends, and the free Chicago Blues Festival each summer is the largest of its kind. That musical energy runs through a city of fiercely distinct neighbourhoods: Wicker Park and Logan Square for indie music, murals and third-wave coffee; Pilsen for Mexican art and the National Museum of Mexican Art; Andersonville, Boystown and Uptown on the north side; Bronzeville for its Great Migration jazz and Black cultural heritage. Exploring two or three neighbourhoods on foot, well beyond the Loop, is how the city actually reveals itself.

Illinois is the birthplace of the Prairie School of architecture, and its shrine sits just west of the city in Oak Park, where Frank Lloyd Wright built his own Home and Studio and where the surrounding streets hold the world's greatest concentration of his early work, including the Unity Temple (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) — the tour is a pilgrimage for design lovers. Oak Park is also the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway, with a small museum in his childhood home. On the South Side, Hyde Park wraps around the neo-Gothic campus of the University of Chicago and includes Wright's masterful Robie House, the lush Jackson Park with its Japanese Garden of the Phoenix (a legacy of the 1893 fair), and the Obama Presidential Center rising nearby. Both suburbs are easy half-day trips from downtown by the Green Line, Metra or a short drive.

Three hours southwest of Chicago, the capital at Springfield is the heart of Lincoln country and the most rewarding downstate stop. Abraham Lincoln lived here for a quarter-century before the presidency, and the town preserves that life with unusual completeness: the Lincoln Home National Historic Site on its restored 1860s block, the Old State Capitol where he served and later lay in state, the Lincoln-Herndon Law Offices, and his imposing tomb in Oak Ridge Cemetery. The Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum ties it together with immersive, family-friendly exhibitions that bring the era vividly to life. Springfield is also a Route 66 town — this is prime territory for the mother road's diners and neon — and its own contribution to American food, the deep-fried “horseshoe” sandwich, is worth trying at least once.

Route 66 begins at a marked sign on Adams Street in downtown Chicago and runs southwest across the whole state, and the Illinois stretch is one of the best-preserved anywhere — vintage gas stations, the Gemini Giant at Wilmington, classic diners through Pontiac and Atlanta, and roadside museums that keep the mother-road story alive. Nature downstate is a genuine surprise. Starved Rock State Park on the Illinois River, ninety minutes from Chicago, packs eighteen wooded sandstone canyons with seasonal waterfalls and is the state's most-visited park; the Great River Road traces the Mississippi bluffs past the eagle-watching town of Grafton. In the far south the Shawnee National Forest hides the wind-sculpted rock formations of the Garden of the Gods, hardwood hills and the little river town of Cairo at the meeting of the Ohio and the Mississippi. A car is essential for all of it.