Chicago is not a place where you generally bump into famous people on the street.
Our rock stars are the silent type — made of glass and steel, terracotta, stone and marble.
Despite their size, these architectural marvels risk becoming the background scenery of rush hour.
But they are the standouts in the 90-minute Chicago River cruises offered by the Chicago Architecture Center — the rough equivalent of a movie scene in which the overlooked giant rises to life.
If you go, here’s a little advice: Give your neck and shoulder muscles a good stretch before boarding the boat because gazing in awe for more than an hour can do a number on them.
Talking with the couple next to me from Knoxville, Tenn., I was thinking: I wish I had done that. They boasted about their river — the Tennessee River — and how excellent it is to arrive at a University of Tennessee football game by boat, as the river is adjacent to the school’s stadium.
Their Southern drawls mixed with the accents of people chatting around us from places like England, Australia, Canada, Spain, Italy and Scotland.
This year’s kicked off in March and continue through Nov. 23.
I tagged along on a tour — a consistently top-rated feature of the city — and lucked out that the weather was perfect: 70s and sunny.
Our docent was Steve Gersten, a retired trader and architecture buff who raised his family in a historic brownstone on North State Parkway on the Gold Coast before moving into the 47th floor of a Near North Side high-rise.
He came up through the Chicago Architecture Center’s rigorous docent program, which he describes as “the only time I liked school in my life.”
The nonprofit Chicago Architecture Center, founded in 1966, is devoted to celebrating and promoting Chicago as a center of architectural innovation. It has been been giving river tours since 1983 and has about 450 docents.
The hook was set for Gersten in 1970 when he walked through the doors of the Chicago Board of Trade building for the first time.
“I still get chills thinking about it,” Gersten says.
It’s the feeling he tries to convey as the boat gets underway.
Though he’s been doing it for years, he gets nervous before every tour. But the butterflies are fleeting. He finds his groove dispensing tidbits like the fact that the old Montgomery Ward building on the North Branch of the river lacked corner offices as a display of the company’s egalitarian ethos.
On the opposite end of the philosophical equation, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center on the South Branch of the river, with its staggered design, allows 16 corner offices per floor.
The Merchandise Mart was once the largest building in the world until it was surpassed by the Pentagon, and others have since snagged that title.
“And there’s some adorable kids over there,” Gersten says as a group of children holding hands walked along the river near the East Bank Club.
He points out the site of Mrs. O’Leary’s barn a couple blocks from the river and explains that her cow has been exonerated from starting the Great Chicago Fire. The land now is home to training for the Chicago Fire Department.
Gersten can throw a curveball to keep people on their toes — like pointing to the layer cake of Lower Wacker Drive, where he says the bones of the winner of the 1970 world-championship hide-and-seek competition recently were found but quickly adds: “That’s a joke!”
Discussing the origins of the Ferris Wheel, he briefly gets into the history of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and its connection with the serial killer H.H. Holmes before scuttling the topic because several children are in the front row.
The cruise ventures north to Chicago Avenue, south to Roosevelt Road and east to the Chicago Harbor Lock before returning to dock along the south side of the river east of Michigan Avenue.
There’s no quiz after the tour; Gersten hopes passengers walk away with an appreciation for the different styles of architecture Chicago has to offer, ranging from glass-and-steel modern to ornate neo-Gothic designs.
“I hope they look at the buildings in a different way,” he says. “Architecture is an art form, and we’ve got a lot to show off and be proud of.”
Gersten makes himself available after the cruise to field questions.
The top one he gets: Where should we go for pizza?