Geoffrey Baer is back to give us a TV tour of some of Chicago’s ‘most beautiful places’

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This being a newspaper, here’s some news: The city is still here.

It is here in all its remembered style and beauty and if there remain, as there have always been, areas that are sadly bruised and bleak, the city has retained enough pizzazz and some exciting relatively new additions to convince me of its vitality.

Even if your life and your relationship with the city may not be as intimate as it had been, muted by the past few pandemic-shadowed years, you should know that Chicago and its environs are still capable of compelling awe.

How you experience this depends on your energy and curiosity, or just a comfy couch, where you can experience the city through TV personality Geoffrey Baer, who has for many years provided what amounts to a series of television travelogues. You have watched him walk, ride his bicycle, cruise on ships along the river, ride the “L” and otherwise explore and explain the place in which we live.

He is a typically ebullient tour guide in his latest jaunt, “The Most Beautiful Places in Chicago,” premiering at 7 p.m. March 7 on WTTW-Ch. 11.

It is handsomely produced and unsurprisingly boosterish, like most all of his previous two dozen-some shows, which had trips on the Chicago River (first in 1995), to the lakefront (2008), the Loop (2011) and most recently on the “L” (2020).

There is a lot packed into its 50-some minutes and you’ll see the ghoulish faces that adorn the often ignored Manhattan Building on South Dearborn Street, the oldest surviving skyscraper in the world; the world’s largest Tiffany mosaic inside the Marshall Field … er, Macy’s building on State Street and, nearby, Louis Sullivan’s entrance to a Target store (formerly Carson Pirie Scott & Co.). Learn what inspired architect Jeanne Gang’s design for the new and gigantic St. Regis Chicago (Vista Tower), the third tallest building in the city and an expensive one too, as Baer shows us an apartment priced at $19 million or so.

He takes us also to my old stomping grounds, the Tribune Tower, remade into a condominium complex with apartments I cannot afford. It’s a too-brief trip, showing us the lobby and a balcony but telling of the long-ago contest to design the structure, won by New York-based architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood.

Other places in the show are familiar, such as The Rookery in the heart of the Loop, but that visit is enriched by the presence and knowledge of former Pulitzer Prize-winning Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin. Standing in the building’s glorious lobby, Kamin intelligently explains the history of the building and gives us his fine take on Chicago architects — in this case Daniel Burnham, John Root and Frank Lloyd Wright — and their ability, then and now, to “elevate the pragmatic into the artistic.”

You can hear that expressed when Baer visits architect Juan Gabriel Moreno, who proudly explains how he designed the El Centro building on the campus of Northeastern Illinois University, hard by the Kennedy Expressway in Avondale.

Baer visits with acclaimed artist Nick Cave, tied to architecture when his work was displayed in Art on theMART, the digital projection of video and images onto the south facade of the building formerly known as Merchandise Mart. Cave is a thoughtful man and sensitively explains the inspiration for his art.

You can hear Baer talk with landscape architect Ernie Wong, who transformed what was once a South Side limestone quarry into the multileveled, multiuse Palmisano Park. Opened in 2009 and named for Henry Palmisano, an ardent fisherman and proprietor of a neighborhood bait shop, it features a fishing pond, trails, an athletic field, a running track, wetlands, preserved quarry walls and stunning views from a hill charmingly known as Mt. Bridgeport.

Wong also designed the landscaped joys of Ping Tom Park on the banks of the Chicago River in Chinatown, a grand outdoor space named for a prominent civic leader.

Another great trip has Baer on the Far Southeast Side at Steelworkers Park, talking with sculptor and South Side native Roman Villarreal about his striking sculpture there, “Tribute to the Past.” This place was once part of the sprawling U.S. Steel complex known as South Works and is now a lovely place, featuring a 40-foot climbing wall that Baer bravely ascends.

Those three places should sit at the top of your “to visit” list, to be employed with spring’s tender weather afoot. That “get out and see the city” feel has always seemed the philosophy behind Baer’s work. He is undeniably a cheerleader and if the program attempts to take on too much — giving us too short glimpses of the remarkable Elks Memorial, South Shore Cultural Center, KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue in Hyde Park and BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Bartlett and the Unity Temple in Oak Park, which gets a bit more time, no doubt due to its being the work of Frank Lloyd Wright — it is nevertheless worth your viewing attention.

This program is embellished by a companion website at wttw.com/beautifulplaces that offers all manner of extras, such as photos, facts, video and the ability for viewers to nominate their own “beautiful places.”

It is undeniably true, as Baer says near the end of the program, that “there is more beauty in Chicago than is possible to fit into one program.” Also, people, for it is through the voices of those Baer talks with that one finds riches beyond brick and mortar and steel.

I know that not all people live within sight of beautiful places and so for them, watching this program may seem a bit like seeing a show about the French Riviera. But perhaps just knowing such spots are out there might be of some comfort. Or hope.

rkogan@chicagotribune.com