Some of Chicago's top comedians take the stage on WCIU. Hosted by comedian and Chicago native Rebecca O'Neal, and taped in front of a live studio audience at Zanies Comedy Club in Rosemont, Illinois, featuring hilariously funny stand-up routines from local comedic giants.

In an area barely ten square blocks, Geoffrey Baer traces the history of the skyscraper in the city where it was born. What makes a city, a city? Is it the buildings? The people? Is it what happened here 100 years ago — or what is happening right now? To find out, we invite you to join us in an urban adventure with WTTW host, writer, and producer Geoffrey Baer’s new multimedia tour through Chicago’s downtown Loop. Explore this site. Listen to the audio stories of the everyday people who inhabit the Loop. Take the tour yourself, with our audio download. Watch the show wherever you are. We know you’ll find one answer for sure. Chicago’s Loop is one of the great American city spaces. Discover its history, architecture, excitement — and most of all, stories.

Set in Prohibition era Chicago, bootlegger Robbo and his cronies refuse to pay the greedy Guy Gisborne a cut of their profits after Guy shoots mob boss Big Jim and takes over. When Big Jim's daughter, Marian, gives Robbo a large sum, believing he has avenged her father's death, the gangster donates to an orphanage, cementing his reputation as a softhearted hood.

Silent home movie shot by Diane and Karol Berolzheimer depicting Chicago's Maxwell street market in the autumn or winter of '78, currently held in collection at the Chicago Film Archives.

Alison Victoria heads to her hometown of Chicago to restore vintage homes in the city's historic neighborhoods.

The architecture of Chicago is world class. But often overlooked are the remarkable buildings and luscious green spaces of the city's South Side. Take a trip with architecture photographer and writer Lee Bey as he explores these masterpieces of design and engineering hidden in plain sight.

The chronicles of the rocky coexistence of midwestern American Larry Appleton and his distant cousin from eastern Mediterranean Europe, Balki Bartokomous.

The history of Chicago's African-American community told like never before -- through the voices of its leading citizens, scholars, artists, politicians, and business leaders.

Join Geoffrey Baer for his newest engaging Chicago tour program, which covers Chicago's historic Western suburbs. Highlights include Brookfield Zoo, McDonald's headquarters, some Frank Lloyd Wright architectural treasures, Morton Arboretum, the Glen Ellyn Children's Chorus, the original Kiddieland in Melrose Park, the annual Pet Parade in LaGrange, a famous Hillside cemetery where Al Capone is buried, and much, much more. Geoffrey’s fascinating trek takes you westward from Cicero to Naperville, and then returns east from Wheaton to Oak Park, visiting more than twenty-five fascinating communities.

Caged. Invisible. Shamed. Trapped. These words mark the tenants, clerks and even the owners of Chicago's last remaining Singe Room Occupancy (SRO) hotels. These small spaces are home for many at the bottom of Chicago's housing ladder. Cloaked in darkness and secrecy, these hotels are often maligned as drug dens and havens for prostitution but the people who live, work and own these hotels have never fully shared their stories. Caged Men is a feature-length documentary which examines the disquieting stories of near-homeless Americans living on the margins and their invisibility in a largely indifferent and, at times, hostile community. It attempts to lend a voice to SRO residents, clerks, owners and to the hotels themselves.

A tough cop meets his match when he has to guard a gangster's widow on a tense train ride.

For five years, feminist artist Judy Chicago worked with a community of four hundred other artists, craftspeople and researchers to create The Dinner Party, a monumental tribute to women of spirit and accomplishment throughout the ages -- women whose names have been banished "right out of history". For over four of those five years, filmmaker Johanna Demetrakas followed the progress of The Dinner Party, recording for posterity the alternately painstaking and exhilarating process of creating this work of unprecedented scale and beauty.

Velma Norman Hill, married more than 60 years, recount their experience braving mob violence at the height of the civil rights movement.

Slick lawyer Thomas Farrell has made a career of defending mobsters in trials. It's not until he meets a lovely showgirl at a mob party that he realizes that there's more to life than winning trials. Farrell tries to quit the racket, but mob boss Rico Angelo threatens to hurt the showgirl if Farrell leaves him.

Chicago February 14th 1929. Al Capone finally establishes himself as the city's boss of organised crime. In a north-side garage his hoods, dressed as policemen, surprise and mow down with machine-guns the key members of Bugs Moran's rival gang. The film traces the history of the incident, and the lives affected and in some cases ended by it.

God presides over a modern metropolis.

Fact-based story about 300 predominantly black sailors who were killed on July 17, 1944 while loading munitions on a ship in San Francisco. Three weeks later, 50 survivors were court-martialed for refusing to load another shipment. The men cited the Navy's lack of care for their safety.

A docudrama series chronicling some of America's most notorious mobsters, each season dealing with a different city/region.

After runaway Ben Young is robbed and left on his own, he is taken in by Lil, the head of a Chicago brothel. Acting as a surrogate mother for Ben, who thinks she runs a boardinghouse, Lil gets him a job with Francis Sullivan at the local newspaper. As Ben is exposed to the workings of the big city, he realizes the extent of government corruption and sets out on the daunting task of reforming Chicago politics, finding several allies along the way.

Through two films, this collection explores the vibrant history of Chicago's legendary Maxwell Street, an area that blossomed from a simple wooden-plank road into the birthplace of Chicago blues. The 1964 documentary And This Is Free offers a slice-of-life portrait of the local scene at the time. Maxwell Street: A Living Memory looks back on the experiences and legacy of the neighborhood's Eastern European Jewish immigrants.