Newyork Hotels

Chicago is famed for a number of things, but many people don’t associate the city with its amazing park district. This is a shame because with more than 7300 acres of parkland, encompassing 552 parks, 16 lagoons, 33 beaches and housing one of the world’s largest fountains, it is truly a great place to visit.

One of the most impressive and popular landmarks is definitely the Buckingham Fountain. The fountain is a great draw for tourists when it is turned on in April to signal the onset of summer. Constructed of Georgia pink marble, the attraction was first opened in May 1927 and still puts on spectacular 20 minute displays every day from mid April through to early fall, on the hour every hour between 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. The displays consist of all the fountain’s 134 jets shooting approximately 14,100 gallons of water per minute, with the center jet shooting 150 feet into the air accompanied by a tremendous light and music presentation.

The fountain was originally designed by Edward H. Bennett, influenced by the Latona Basin in Louis XIV’s gardens at Versailles, to represent Lake Michigan with four sea horses, created by Marcel Loyau, to symbolize the four states that touch the lake.

The fountain was dedicated to the people of Chicago in 1927 in memory of Clarence Buckingham, the late brother of Kate Buckingham who commissioned the creation of the structure. Kate Buckingham had a vision to construct a fountain which created the effect of “soft moonlight”, and she worked tirelessly with the fountain’s many technicians to test out a variety of colors for the glass filters and different water currents in order to produce a mystical, ethereal feel to the whole piece.

The pond life around the area is often teeming with frogs, herons, and dragonflies, and the shrubs are frequently filled with resting migratory birds; the lush prairie region is also embedded with native grasses and wildflowers, making the Park District of Chicago a beautiful and serene place to go to while staying in the city. It is within easy distance of the Sears tower, one of the tallest buildings in the world, with its new Skydeck, the up market Merchandise Mart Mall, which will make even the most enthusiastic of power shoppers happy, and luxury hotels like the fabulous Conrad Hotel - so you can get a taste of nature but enjoy all the luxury and amenities that a big city can provide.

Andrew Regan is an online journalist who enjoys socialising at his local Edinburgh rugby club.

Share This

New York is more than America’s largest city: it has been and continues to be the inspiration behind much of the country’s most enduring pieces of art and literature. From Langston Hughes to Jonathan Safran Foer, and Jackson Pollock to Mark Rothko, New York City has been the thriving hub of many an American cultural movement since the beginning of the 1900s. This fact is made even more evident by the city’s wide array of museums and art galleries, the most prominent of which are The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), The Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum, among a host of others.

Both artistically and architecturally, New York’s Guggenheim Museum (technically called The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) is one of the city’s most interesting landmarks and artistic forums. The eminent novelist E.B. White once said, “New York is to the nation what the white spire is to the village,” and it might be possible to say that, artistically speaking, the white spire of New York is the Guggenheim. Situated at the corners of 89th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, its architect Frank Lloyd Wright set out to make the building look like what has been described as “a white ribbon curled into a cylindrical stack,” and was intent on his avant-garde design making the Metropolitan Museum of Art look like “a Protestant barn”. Though widely condemned at the time, the building is now seen as one of New York’s finest - as is often the case with the best pieces of architecture.

Originally set up in 1937 as “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting”, the Guggenheim was principally established to exhibit work by early modernists, like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. In particular, it continues to exhibit the work of Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock on an ongoing basis. Recent exhibitions have included various showings of Russian and socialist art, Robert Mapplethorpe and the Classical Tradition, David Smith: A Centennial and the images of Baghdad-born artist Zaha Hadid. Its future planned showcases include the work of Lucio Fontana, and Spanish Painting from El Greco to Picasso. This eclectic range of artists and artistic works demonstrates the ongoing commitment of the Guggenheim Museum to its original goal, to showcase the work of new modernism, whilst still embracing new forms of modern art in the twenty-first century. Although “high” modern and postmodern art have been the main artistic lines pursued by the Guggenheim, it has also been host to a variety of commercial art, including seasons exhibiting motorcycles and Giorgio Armani suits.

The Guggenheim Museum in New York is part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, a non-profit organisation founded in 1937 by eminent philanthropist Solomon R. Guggenheim and artist Hilla von Rebay. Since the establishment of the first Guggenheim in New York, the foundation has gone on to open further museums in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and Las Vegas, and is in the process of establishing another Guggenheim in Abu Dhabi. For the artistic holiday maker, a perfect vacation idea might be a trip around the world to all the Guggenheim museums. This idea is not even as expensive as it might seem: for example, there are Hilton Hotels in all of these cities, and using the Hilton Honors rewards system, travelling art fans can use their accumulated points to reclaim hotel rewards as well as air miles with a variety of different airlines, to make their worldwide Guggenheim tour a vacation with a difference.

Andrew Regan is an online journalist who enjoys socialising at his local Edinburgh rugby club.

Share This