Gold Coast

This guide to Chicago's Gold Coast begins in a laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute, where Charles Lindbergh knelt over a hand-blown glass pump keeping a cat's thyroid gland pulsing outside its body. It follows why the world's most famous pilot traded his cockpit for a lab bench, teaching himself glassblowing alongside a Nobel-winning surgeon to build an apparatus meant to help his ailing sister-in-law. The guide then turns to the swampy shoreline a department-store magnate filled in after the great fire, and to the limestone mansion nearby, modeled on a palace at Versailles, where that invention now sits on display.