Exploring Chicago’s museums

On the south side of the Chicago Cultural Center there's a 38-foot-diameter glass dome that is billed as "the world's largest stained glass Tiffany dome." Its thousands of glass pieces are cut like fish scales, and the signs of the zodiac adorn the top of the dome. It's in Preston Bradley Hall, frequently used as a party space, but generally available for daytime visitors to look in on. For decades it had been a pale version of its initially splendid self, thanks to a 1935 protective measure that put a concrete and copper exterior dome above and cut the sunlight that made it sparkle. But a $2.2 million restoration completed in 2008 cleaned the glass, surrounded it with new metal framework and replaced the old, upper dome with a translucent one so that sunlight could once again shine through Louis Comfort Tiffany's glass. Read more.

This sculpture by French paleoartist Elisabeth Daynes delivers, with a jolt, the humanity of the Neanderthal. It is all the more striking in its location in a mostly fossil gallery, the Field's great "Evolving Planet" exhibition. Daynès' reconstruction techniques meld both art and science. She told the museum, "My work is both an artistic and scientific challenge. ... I have chosen to represent (my subjects with) attitudes that express reflection, pain, compassion and deepest human feelings. If Neanderthal was walking nowadays in the streets of a city, he would be unnoticed." In "Evolving Planet," he practically jumps out at you. Read more.

While recuperating from World War I shrapnel wounds in a Milan hospital, a teenage Ernest Hemingway became engaged to his older nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, an American working with the Red Cross. The modest museum in Oak Park, where the author was born and raised, has von Kurowsky's breakup letter to Hemingway and, um, ouch. "Ernie, dear boy," it begins. "... I know that I am still very fond of you, but, it is more as a mother than as a sweetheart. ... Your friend, Aggie." Read more.

Moving into the newer Harold Washington Wing of the South Side's DuSable Museum brings you face to face — alarmingly so, if you aren't prepared — with Harold Washington. There's a life-size animatronic replica of the city's first black mayor seated behind an old desk of his, holding forth on his election and too-brief tenure (and freaking out some little kids who see it, employees say). "When you visit again, I will tell you about my time in office and Council Wars," the robot replica says. "See you soon." Read more.

There are only three residences designed and built by the modernist architect Mies van der Rohe in the United States, and only two of those are open to the public. One, Farnsworth House, is far to the southwest of Chicago in Plano. The other, the McCormick House from 1952, is on the grounds of the well-regarded Elmhurst Art Museum. The home itself is a kind of fever dream for lovers of the midcentury modern esthetic. Thought of as a prototype for mass-produced modular housing, it was commission ed by poet Isabella Gardner (grandniece of the Boston museum patron of the same name) and Robert McCormick Jr., a member of the famous Chicago family who was sales agent for the Mies building at 860-880 Lake Shore Drive. Read more.

"Oh!" Capt. James Lovell exclaimed, rounding a corner to see the viewing platform now built up around his Gemini 12 space capsule, brought to the Adler in 2006. "The big problem before was we got the Gemini 12, but it was on the floor," he said, so children couldn't easily see into it. Now visitors are only a clear panel away from stepping into the metallic flying cone that was the last one before the Apollo program. "I hope that ejection seat still isn't loaded," said Lovell during a 2015 visit, showing off the revamped "Mission Moon" exhibition. Read more.

It's easy to overlook this one. Passing by, it just looks like an old-school museum diorama, and the primary animals are nothing more exotic than common white-tailed deer. Yet this four-cornered display — a diorama installation, really — is "the Mona Lisa of taxidermy mounts," in the words of a Field expert. Read more.

"When I finished Unity Temple, I had it," Frank Lloyd Wright — never one for modesty, false or otherwise — said of his own handiwork. "I knew I had the beginning of a great thing, a great truth in architecture." Wright was right, and the greatest space in this great building, a church built for a Unitarian congregation on a budget in 1908, is its sanctuary. Done in earth tones and dressed up in Wright's exquisite art-glass chandeliers, it demonstrates superb acoustics and an overall feeling of warmth. And now the church on Lake Street in Oak Park has been thoroughly rehabbed and opened again to the public after $25 million in restoration work. Read more.

Occupying pride of place in a lovely little park south of the Loop in the Prairie Avenue Historic District, the Clarke House Museum showcases its prime object, Clarke House itself. Built in 1836 for merchant Henry B. Clarke, it is the city's oldest house. The city population was about 4,000 at the time, but Clarke, from Utica, N.Y., saw promise and joined a hardware firm. That promise wasn't fully kept, however, and he took to farming on his 20 acres at approximately 1700 S. Michigan Ave. The timber frame house in the Greek Revival style was built by a local carpenter; a cupola was added in the 1850s. Read more.

This charming newcomer to the Chicago cultural scene is not about objects and artifacts. Through its initial months, for much of 2017, it does have Jack Kerouac's original manuscript scroll of "On the Road" on display. But the museum is mostly about authors and writing, a story it tells via instruction on writing, available typewriters and paper and a chronology of significant U.S. writers. An exception, though, is the splendid "Word Waterfall" at the end of the long Writers Hall. It's a video installation comprised of words, quotes and a few images on the theme of what America means. Read more.

One of the few items almost always on display at the Smart Museum of Art on the University of Chicago campus is this Frank Lloyd Wright dining set, originally designed for the nearby Frederick C. Robie House. Wright believed in "unified design," essentially in crafting the entirety of his clients' living quarters. Sure, you can look at the oak table and those straight-backed chairs and think about how your lower back would feel at the end of a long dinner party. Or you could go with the Smart's more optimistic take: "When filled with diners, the table and high-backed chairs enclose the group, almost like a room, for one of the most central of family activities." Read more.

The new-in-2016 Chicago Maritime Museum tells the story of the city through its waterways. And no part of that maritime history has been more tragic than the July 1915 tale of the SS Eastland, a boat docked in the Chicago River, preparing to take 2,500 people on a Western Electric Company outing to Michigan City, Ind. It rolled over while still dockside. In the ensuing chaos, more than 800 people died. A prized museum artifact, displayed in a special case built at a cost of about $20,000, this early-20th-century diving suit was used in recovery efforts after the disaster. Read more.

The Block Museum has a vibrant sculpture collection both in the museum and about the campus. One of the highlights is the 1971 work "Constellation," by the Spanish artist Joan Miro. Constructed of cast bronze, and "likely sculpted by the artist's hands," the museum says, its round shape and "organic lines" suggest the celestial theme referred to in the piece's title. But there is whimsy here, too: Is that golden globe meant to suggest a nose on a face? Decide for yourself. Read more.

Visitors to this outdoor museum at Aurora Municipal Airport in Sugar Grove can see a variety of vintage aircraft. One of the most famous — and one available for climbing in — is a helicopter nicknamed the "Huey," the iconic aircraft of the Vietnam War (not pictured). It carried seven persons including "pilot, co-pilot, crew chief, and four passengers," the museum's website says. "With a gross weight of 7,200 lb. the maximum speed was 62 knots and it had a range of 163 nautical miles."

These are the buckets of your youth, Chicagoans. For decades, visitors to Chicago's various "Bozo's Circus" shows would play the bucket game: toss a pingpong ball into each of a series of numbered little buckets to win a grand prize. They're part of an extensive collection of Chicago TV memorabilia at Bruce DuMont's State Street museum. (The buckets pictured are stored at WGN Studios in Chicago.) You can still find listings for an at-home version of the "Bozo Bucket Bonanza Grand Prize Game" on Amazon. Read more.