Bolingbrook's Clow International

Cantigny is just off KDPA in Wheaton; from the air it's a 500-acre estate with formal gardens, and on the south lawn a row of US Army armor sitting in the grass: a Sherman, a Patton, a Bradley, and the guns that worked with them. That armor is the tell for what this place is. Robert McCormick, the Chicago Tribune publisher, led artillery supporting the 1st Infantry Division at the Battle of Cantigny in France in 1918, the first American victory of World War I, and it marked him for life. He named his estate after the battle, hosted Big Red One reunions here for decades, and willed the 500 acres to the people of Illinois. The First Division Museum on the grounds tells the division's story from WWI to now, with recreated environments you walk through: a Western Front trench, the cliffs above Omaha Beach, a Vietnam jungle. Alexander Hamilton commanded the same field artillery regiment during the Revolution; it's one of the oldest in the Army.

Frank Lloyd Wright built his own house in Oak Park in 1889 when he was 22, financed in part by a $5,000 loan from his employer Louis Sullivan. He lived there for the next 20 years and added a studio in 1898, where he developed what would become the Prairie School — the first uniquely American architectural style of the 20th century. The suspended drafting balcony in the studio was one of his earliest structural innovations. Oak Park has the highest concentration of Wright-designed buildings anywhere — more than 25 within walking distance of the Home & Studio. Among them is Unity Temple (1908), one of the most influential public buildings of the early 20th century: a poured-concrete cube with no traditional front door, designed to dissolve the boundary between interior and exterior space. Wright called it his "little jewel." The Robie House (1910) in Hyde Park is the consummate Prairie style — designed at the Oak Park studio for manufacturing executive Frederick Robie. Its dramatic horizontal cantilevered roof, banded art-glass windows, and three-car garage (exceedingly rare in 1910) made it a complete departure from traditional residential architecture. The seminary that owned it twice proposed demolition (1941 and 1957); Wright himself joined the protest, supposedly quipping that the episode showed the danger of entrusting anything spiritual to the clergy. In 2019 UNESCO designated eight Wright buildings as a World Heritage Site — "The 20th-Century Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright." Two of those eight are in Illinois: Unity Temple and the Robie House. The Oak Park Home & Studio is separately a National Historic Landmark.

Pullman was America's first planned model industrial community. George Pullman, the railroad-car magnate whose sleeping cars revolutionized long-distance travel, founded it in 1880 on what was then farmland 13 miles south of Chicago. He hired architect Solon Spencer Beman and landscape architect Nathan F. Barrett to design a complete town — factory, row houses, hotel, church, library, school, parks — and rented every building to his workers. Pullman believed that good housing and amenities would produce loyal, productive employees. The experiment ran for fourteen years. In 1894, after a national depression cut demand for sleeping cars, Pullman slashed wages without lowering rents. The Pullman Strike that followed shut down rail traffic across the country and ended only when President Cleveland sent in federal troops. Thirty workers died. The 1894 strike is the reason Labor Day became a federal holiday — Congress passed it days after the troops withdrew, hoping to mollify the labor movement. The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, organized by A. Philip Randolph in 1925 from the ranks of Pullman's Black porter workforce, became the first Black-led labor union to win a collective bargaining agreement with a major American corporation. Michelle Obama's grandfather was a Pullman porter. President Obama designated Pullman a National Monument in 2015 — the first National Park Service unit in Chicago. President Biden signed legislation redesignating it Pullman National Historical Park on December 29, 2022. The 1880-era street grid, more than 1,300 row houses, the Hotel Florence (named for Pullman's daughter), the Administration Clock Tower Building, and the Greenstone Church are nearly all intact.

The Chicago skyline is one of the great urban approaches in American aviation. From any general aviation field in the western Chicago suburbs, the city rises as a vertical wall of steel and glass out of an otherwise flat prairie — visible from 25+ nautical miles on a clear day. Willis Tower (formerly Sears Tower from 1973-2009) is the anchor at 1,450 feet to the roof and 1,729 feet to the antenna tips. It was the tallest building in the world from 1973 until 1998 (passed by the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur) and remains the third-tallest in the US. The diagonal X-bracing tower north of it is 875 N Michigan (formerly the John Hancock Center) at 1,128 feet — the second-tallest in Chicago and an easier visual reference because of its tapered black profile. Trump Tower (1,388 feet) and the St. Regis Chicago (1,191 feet, the tallest building in the world designed by a woman, Jeanne Gang) round out the high points. Lake Michigan provides the eastern boundary — an inland sea so large it has its own horizon. Lake Shore Drive curves along the shore from Hyde Park in the south to Lincoln Park in the north, with Navy Pier projecting into the lake like a hook. The Loop street grid sits at roughly 45 degrees offset from the surrounding citywide grid — a tell that you are over downtown. Class B airspace is the principal constraint. Most GA pilots either request Class B transition with ATC, transit the VFR corridor along the lakefront when published, or stay clear by skirting the southern or western shelves. The City of Chicago Heliport on the lakefront and the (now-demolished) Meigs Field site are landmarks worth knowing.