Any self-respecting travel guide to Chicago will tell you (and I can almost guarantee this without exception) that while the observatory on the ninety-fourth floor of the John Hancock Centre is a great viewing point from which to see the city, you can get the same view on the adjacent ninety-fifth floor for the price of a drink.
As you can imagine, the drinks in the ninety-fifth floor Signature Lounge (11h00 – 00h30, 01h30 at weekends, www.signatureroom.com) are sold at marginally inflated prices, and the service is hardly worthy of the fifteen percent you’ll be adding to tab, but then that’s not the reason you come here.
Ascending from the building’s basement lobby on North Michigan Avenue, the elevator rattles at speed all the way to the top. I’ve experienced smoother elevators in university buildings a quarter the height of the Hancock Centre, but since I’m in the company of an elevator full of relaxed and chatty Mexican waiters, I’m reassured that the ride is always this bumpy. Alighting at the ninety-fifth floor, you can look down immediately to the double height restaurant space, in use tonight for a charity fund raiser. The disconcerting view down one level and out through the windows of the floor below me sends me knees into spasms, but I manage to stagger round (eagering resting one vertiginous hand on the inner wall of the corridor) to the main bar, which occupies the complete western side of the building at this height.
Visiting after dark on this unseasonably warm and therefore rainy January evening, the view is utterly breathtaking. In the same way that the Empire State Building offers a view set back from the main cluster of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, the Hancock Centre was deliberately placed outside the dense downtown core of skyscrapers and office buildings. This sacrifice in location means the view is even more spectacular: the tight downtown pile of steel and glass skyscrapers can be seen in one glance from here, including the dizzying heights of the 443 metre Sears Tower. The Sears Tower is taller than the Hancock Centre by several storeys, and the competing SkyDeck observatory is a similarly popular tourist destination. But on a night like tonight, with scattered rain clouds scudding over Chicago at a speed that confirms the city’s nickname, the top of the Sears Tower is hidden in cloud. We seem to be at just the right height for a clear view out onto the orange lights of the Windy City.
My first visit to Chicago was almost five years ago, when a connecting flight brought me through O’Hare Airport en route to western Canada. My first taste of the United States of America was an airport that I couldn’t leave for fear of missing my onward flight. A long trans-Atlantic flight spent strapped into a middle-block seat of a widebody jetliner was finally concluded with a striking view out across the laps of my fellow passengers. We approached the airport directly parallel to the city’s grid of streets, and for a few brief moments before landing, the windows to my left and right framed a perspective of parallel streets flashing past, all pointing towards invisible vanishing points on distant horizons. From up here, my visit to Chicago is suddenly brought into remarkable clarity. The vast grid of right angled streets is laid out before me and marked out with orange streetlights.
The Signature Lounge is packed tonight. There are tourists from Japan, Australia and Holland. Everyone takes their turn upon arrival to edge towards the floor-to-ceiling windows that line the bar, and to peer out over the narrow triple glazed edge to the streets and diminutive neighbouring buildings below. I like neither heights not cognac, but in order to make the most of this view, I drink slowly and gradually acclimatise to both.
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