Tours

Opened in 1916, rebuilt in 1995, and free to walk onto. The Ferris wheel was replaced in 2016 by the taller enclosed Centennial Wheel, the stained-glass museum closed in 2014, and the shops and restaurants older accounts list have almost all gone.

North Michigan Avenue emptied out badly in the early 2020s and is only now refilling, so guides that list shops are useless here. The buildings are the better reason to walk it — and the fire was in 1871, not around 1900.

The lakefront is open ground because Montgomery Ward sued the city for twenty years to keep it that way. Millennium Park's Cloud Gate, Crown Fountain and Gehry bandshell, Buckingham Fountain, and two park names that mislead.

The Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba: begun as the Great Mosque in 785, a consecrated Catholic cathedral since 1236, with its mihrab, its Renaissance nave and a contested ownership.

The island reads as a string of separate villages the grid was laid over, and a neighbourhood a day works far better than a list of scattered sights. What each area is like from Tribeca to Inwood, the distinct characters of Fifth, Madison and Park Avenues, and why zig-zagging across Manhattan wastes a day underground.

The aquarium older accounts describe has largely ceased to exist — no platypus, no crocodile, no seal, no tiger or lemon shark, and not one of the five zone names in circulation survives. Of the two rescued dugongs, one has died and the other has moved out of the exhibit built for them. One warning about figures: the operator's own website gives three different species counts on three different pages.

Port Jackson and Sydney Harbour are the same water — the port and transport agencies write the two names interchangeably. Fort Denison is closed to visitors throughout 2026, Transport for NSW does not publish which Circular Quay wharf most ferries leave from, and only about half the harbour's monitored swimming spots reach the grade that nearly all ocean beaches manage.