North Michigan Avenue & The Magnificent Mile
Magnificent Mile shopping The southern end of the Magnificent MileMichigan Avenue originally ended at the Chicago River, and what is now Michigan Avenue north of the river was originally named Pine Street, after scattered pine trees originally found in its vicinity. As early as 1891 plans were proposed to extend Michigan Avenue north across the river. An early plan called for a tunnel to link Michigan Avenue south of the river with Pine Street, and in 1903 an editorial in the Chicago Tribune proposed a new Bascule bridge across the river at Michigan Avenue. This plan was further elaborated upon in Daniel Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago, and in 1911 a plan was selected that included the widening of Michigan Avenue from Randolph Street to the river, replacing the Rush Street bridge with a new bridge at Michigan Avenue and the construction of a double-decked boulevard along Pine Street as far as Ohio Street. When the Michigan Avenue bridge was completed, Pine Street was renamed Michigan Avenue. At its north end it merges into Lake Shore Drive near the Drake Hotel.
Today, the area north of the Chicago River is referred to as the Magnificent Mile, or sometimes simply the Mag Mile. It contains a mixture of upscale department stores, restaurants, high-end retailers, office buildings and hotels, and caters primarily to tourists and the affluent. The area also has a high concentration of the city's major media firms, and advertising agencies, including the Chicago Tribune newspaper.
It is the home of Chicago's famous Water Tower landmark, Water Tower Park with its historic clock, as well as the eight-level Water Tower Place shopping center which grew up next door to, and overshadowed, the comparatively diminutive landmark. North of the shopping center can be found the famous John Hancock Center, the art deco Palmolive Building (also known as the Playboy Building) and the lavish Drake Hotel.The entire mile is noted for its spectacular Christmas displays. At the northern edge of this district can be found the One Magnificent Mile building; Chicago Landmark East Lake Shore Drive District, an extremely expensive and exclusive one-block area of real estate running east from North Michigan Ave. and facing directly onto to Lake Michigan; and the on-ramp to northbound Lake Shore Drive.
Read more about this topic: Michigan Avenue (Chicago)
Famous quotes containing the words north, avenue, magnificent and/or mile:
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)
“I hate to do what everybody else is doing. Why, only last week, on Fifth Avenue and some cross streets, I noticed that every feminine citizen of these United States wore an artificial posy on her coat or gown. I came home and ripped off every one of the really lovely refrigerator blossoms that were sewn on my own bodices.”
—Carolyn Wells (1862–1942)
“Many of our houses, both public and private, with their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace, appear to me extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which infest them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile:
He bought a crooked cat which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a little crooked house.”
—Mother Goose (fl. 17th–18th century. There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile (l. 1–4)