Museum Campus

The Field Museum of Natural History fills a vast columned building at the campus's western edge with treasures of the natural and cultural world. Its most famous resident is one of the largest and most complete Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons ever found, a towering specimen that greets visitors and anchors a hall of prehistoric life. Around it stretch galleries of animals, gems, ancient Egypt, and cultures from every continent.

The museum grew out of the collections gathered for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the great world's fair held in Chicago, and it has been building its holdings ever since. It is a place where a single visit can take you from the ocean floor to outer space, from an Egyptian tomb to a Pacific Northwest longhouse, and its scale rewards return trips as much as a first look.

The Shedd Aquarium, in an elegant classical building beside the lake, is one of the country's oldest and largest public aquariums. Its habitats range from the flooded forests of the Amazon to Pacific coastal waters, and its great oceanarium holds beluga whales, dolphins, sea otters, and other marine mammals in a naturalistic setting that looks out toward Lake Michigan itself.

The aquarium opened in the early 1930s and famously stocked its first tanks with seawater and creatures hauled to Chicago by railroad tank cars from the ocean. Today it is a leader in aquatic conservation and a favorite of families, with sharks, rays, sea dragons, and thousands of other animals drawing visitors into the underwater world just steps from the freshwater lake outside.

Out at the tip of the peninsula stands the Adler Planetarium, the oldest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, opened in 1930. Its domed theaters carry audiences on immersive journeys through the night sky and across the universe, and its galleries hold a remarkable collection of historic astronomical instruments, from antique telescopes to sundials and celestial globes.

The Adler's location is part of its magic. The point on which it sits offers what many consider the single best view of the Chicago skyline, the towers rising across the water with the lake stretching beyond. Between the shows inside and the panorama outside, the planetarium sends visitors home with both the stars and the city in mind.

The Museum Campus was created in the 1990s when a stretch of Lake Shore Drive was rerouted, freeing land to knit the three museums into a single green park. Landscaped paths, lawns, and terraces now connect them, and the campus links to Chicago's continuous lakefront trail, which runs for miles along the shore for walking and cycling.

Just beyond lie Soldier Field, the historic stadium, and Northerly Island, a peninsula of restored prairie, trails, and a concert venue that offers quiet nature and more skyline views. The whole campus is exposed to the lake, so it can be windy and cool even in warm months, but that breezy openness is part of its appeal, a rare place where great museums sit in a park at the edge of a great lake.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.