The Library That Became a Free Museum Under a Tiffany Dome

This limestone palace on your right did not start as a cultural center. It opened in eighteen ninety seven as the main building of the Chicago Public Library, the land for it donated by a Civil War veterans group on the condition that the library maintain a Civil War memorial room, which is why its north entrance still carries the solemn weight of a monument rather than a reading room.

Inside, Preston Bradley Hall holds a dome thirty eight feet across, set with more than sixty thousand individual pieces of hand cut favrile glass designed by the artist Jacques Albert Holzer, using glass manufactured at the Kokomo Opalescent Glass works in Indiana. The building's own historians call it the largest Tiffany glass dome in the world, a claim that depends on exactly how you measure, but no one disputes that it is one of the largest anywhere, sitting above a room most people drive past without ever realizing what hangs over the ceiling tiles. The central library moved out in nineteen ninety one, ninety four years after it opened, when the Harold Washington Library Center took over as the city's main branch. Rather than let the old building sit empty, the city had already begun converting it, starting in nineteen seventy eight under Commissioner of Cultural Affairs Lois Weisberg, into the nation's first free municipal cultural center, open to anyone, no admission charged, a promise the building has kept for decades since. A recent multi year restoration releaded and cleaned every one of those glass panes, piece by piece, so the hall glows today roughly the way it did when veterans first gathered beneath it.