Irish immigrants raised the church in front of you, one of the oldest buildings in Chicago, and it watched the city burn and survived. Old St. Patrick's was completed in 1856, raised by Irish immigrants who poured into the city to dig canals and lay rail. When the Great Fire swept through in 1871, the flames stopped just short of here, and the church came through untouched, one of the few public buildings in the city older than the fire.
Its two mismatched towers, one a Romanesque cupola and one a tall Eastern spire, were said to represent the meeting of West and East, of the Roman and the Byzantine. Inside, around 1912, the artist Thomas O'Shaughnessy filled the windows with luminous Celtic stained glass inspired by the Book of Kells. Notice the two unlike towers, then step inside if you can to see the green and gold light of one of the great interiors of Irish America.