The electric commuter rail line that starts at Randolph Street, goes under the Art Institute, past the convention center, past the Robie House, past the Museum of Science and Industry (at the one time White City) and all the way to Indiana is still at the corner of Randolph and Michigan where it has always been, but it's a lot harder to find. In the 1990s a park was envisioned that would cover over the rail yards, be dedicated to the future and named after that then upcoming millennium. The park finally opened this year, a few years after the millennium although I guess it is still close enough to count in terms of a thousand year period. Those extra four years spent were proportional to an increasingly more ambitious park, the final result of which is both immensely popular and pretty damn cool. 

One of the three (or four) coolest things is Cloud Gate, featured in all of these slides and hard to miss. It is an unusually shiny sculpture by former Turner Prize winner Anish Kapoor (extra bonus points available for anyone who doesn't listen to the BBC World Report and knows what the hell the Turner Prize actually is). It sits just above a winter time ice rink (see first slide), attracts people like a giant magnet (it's not really magnetic, see second slide), has unbelievably cool reflections underneath (see third slide) and, of course, kind of looks like a giant jellybean (see fourth slide).