McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink

McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink is a multi-purpose venue within Millennium Park in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. It has served as an ice skating rink, a dining facility and briefly as an open-air exhibition space. The plaza is generally open four months a year, from mid-November until mid-March, when it hosts over 100,000 skaters annually.

About McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink in brief

Summary McCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice RinkMcCormick Tribune Plaza & Ice Rink is a multi-purpose venue within Millennium Park in the Loop community area of Chicago, Illinois, in the United States. On December 20, 2001, it became the first attraction in Millennium Park to open. It has served as an ice skating rink, a dining facility and briefly as an open-air exhibition space. The plaza is generally open four months a year, from mid-November until mid-March, when it hosts over 100,000 skaters annually. For the rest of the year, it serves as Plaza at Park Grill or Park Grill Plaza, Chicago’s largest outdoor dining facility. The 150-seat park grill hosts various culinary events as well as music during its months of outdoor operation, and it is affiliated with the 300-seat indoor Park Grill restaurant located beneath AT&T Plaza and Cloud Gate. It is known as one of Chicago’s better outdoor people-watching locations during the winter months. The rink was funded by and named for the McCormick Tribune Foundation, which was established by former Chicago Tribune owner and publisher Robert R. McCormick. As of 2007, Millennium Park, which is located in the northwest corner of Grant Park, trails only Navy Pier as a Chicago tourist attraction. In the summer of 2002, the exhibit associated with the exhibit had sold over 1.6 million copies, and the photographs were displayed in Brazil, Lebanon, Sweden, Poland, Germany, Norway, Hungary and dozens of other countries.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand Presents From Above to 2002, a French aerial photographer, used planes and helicopters to photograph sites in over 60 countries on every continent. The exhibit featured 4-by-6-foot photographic prints along the banks of the Volga River in Russia, along with more than 120 cities, starting in Paris and including Paris and Geneva and including Geneva and Geneva. It was the first American city to host the exhibit, and the book associated with it was sold over 5 million copies in summer 2002. The book was published by Simon & Schuster, which also owns the rights to the photographs. The exhibition was held from June 21 to September 15, 2002, at the Exelon Exhibition Center in New York City, and was the last to be shown in the U.S. until the end of September 2002. It featured more than 100 of the world’s most famous aerial photographs, including photos of the Great Wall of China, the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Canyon and the Statue of Liberty. It also featured a large-scale model of the Chicago skyline.