Secrets along Michigan Avenue
Michigan Avenue
Passing shoppers peer into the windows that front Carol DeFoor and Rebecca Brown's cupboard-small shop, Antiques on Michigan. The cramped quarters contain an assortment that might have been pulled from the city's dusty attic: an 1893 Chicago World's Fair parasol, Kewpie dolls from a long-gone amusement park, doorknobs from a razed South Side church, and jewelry that belonged to a Gold Coast dowager.
"It's an eclectic -- OK, weird -- assortment of stuff," Rebecca says. "But this part of Michigan Avenue is an amazing universe of people who are different from those up the avenue. It's not unusual for us to sell a necklace to some opera singer who's come to take voice lessons next door."
"Next door" is the Fine Arts Building, surely a last of its kind. In the warren of tiny studios, aging voice and acting coaches teach aspiring ingenues, and Old World violin artisans refurbish the occasional Stradivarius. Architects' offices occupy other rooms.
These establishments flourish along the "arty" southern reaches of the boulevard, well south of the Chicago River and the 14 blocks known as the Magnificent Mile. But you'll also find surprises in that glittering retail canyon. If you look, the new, intriguingly offbeat and even quaint present themselves up and down Chicago's unofficial main street.
Along the Mile -- from the Chicago River north to Oak Street -- more is more and big is bigger. Six lanes of traffic, horns honking and police whistles blowing, stop and start past high-rise malls and even taller hotels. Edging sidewalks and in the median, mums bloom by the thousands in fall, and trees twinkle with a million lights for the holidays.
Michigan Avenue throws off its glitzy trappings as soon as it crosses the river, but the street's south end claims icons of its own: The Art Institute of Chicago, its trademark lion sculptures guarding the entrance, and the institute's art school; Symphony Center; the Chicago Hilton, once the world's largest hotel; Roosevelt University; Columbia College; and sprawling Grant Park, with Buckingham Fountain splashing amid green spaces and trees taking on autumn hues. Millennium Park, a redeveloped area in Grant Park, with a free winter ice-skating rink, is an impressive newcomer.
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