Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
11141 S. Cottage Grove Ave.
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773/785-8901.
www.pullmanil.org. Tues-Sun 11am-3pm. Free admission.
Train: Metra Electric line to Pullman (111th St.), turn right on Cottage Grove Ave. and walk 1 block to the vis-
itor center.
International Museum of Surgical Science
This unintentionally
macabre shrine to medicine is my pick for the weirdest tourist attraction in
town. Not for the faint of stomach, it is run by the International College of Sur-
geons and is housed in a historic 1917 Gold Coast mansion designed by the
noted architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, who modeled it after Le Petit Trianon
at Versailles. Displayed throughout its four floors are surgical instruments,
paintings, and sculptures depicting the history of surgery and healing practices
in Eastern and Western civilizations. The exhibits are old-fashioned (no interac-
tive computer displays here!), but that's part of the museum's odd appeal.
You'll look at your doctor in a whole new way after viewing the trepanned
skulls excavated from an ancient tomb in Peru. The accompanying tools were
used to bore holes in patients' skulls, a horrific practice thought to release the
evil spirits causing their illness (some skulls show signs of new bone growth,
meaning that some lucky headache-sufferers actually survived this low-tech sur-
gery). There are also battlefield amputation kits, a working iron-lung machine
in the polio exhibit, and oddities such as a stethoscope designed to be trans-
ported inside a top hat. Other attractions include an apothecary shop and den-
tist's office (ca. 1900), re-created in a historic street exhibit, and the
hyperbolically titled “Hall of Immortals,” a sculpture gallery depicting 12 his-
toric figures in medicine, from Hippocrates to Madame Curie.
1524 N. Lake Shore Dr. (between Burton Place and North Ave.).
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312/642-6502.
www.imss.org. Admis-
sion $6 adults, $3 seniors and students. Free admission Tues. Tues-Sat 10am-4pm (Sun 10am-4pm
May-Sept). Bus: 151.
Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art
Chicago is home to an
active community of collectors of so-called “outsider art,” a term attached to a
group of unknown, unconventional artists who do their artwork without any
formal training or connection to the mainstream art world. Often called folk or
self-taught artists, their work is highly personal and idiosyncratic, and they work
in a range of media, from bottle caps to immense canvases. Intuit was founded
in 1991 to bring attention to these artists through exhibitions and educational
lectures. Housed in the warehouse district northwest of the Loop, with two gal-
leries and a performance area, the museum offers a regular lecture series, and if
you time your visit right, you might be here for one of the center's tours of a pri-
vate local art collection. Allow 1 hour.
756 N. Milwaukee Ave. (at Chicago and Ogden aves.).
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312/243-9088.
http://outsider.art.org. Free admis-
sion. Wed-Sat noon-5pm. Bus: 56 or 66. Subway/El: Blue Line to Chicago.
Jane Addams Hull-House Museum
Three years after the Haymarket Riot,
a young woman named Jane Addams bought an old mansion on Halsted Street
that had been built in 1856 as a “country home” but was now surrounded by
the shanties of the immigrant poor. Here, Addams and her co-worker, Ellen
Gates Starr, launched the American settlement-house movement with the estab-
lishment of Hull House, an institution that endured on this site in Chicago until
1963. (It continues today as a decentralized social-service agency known as Hull
House Association.) In that year, all but two of the settlement's 13 buildings,
along with the entire residential neighborhood in its immediate vicinity, were
demolished to make room for the new University of Illinois at Chicago campus,
which now owns the museum buildings. Of the original settlement, what
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