1. Photo
    In Chicago, experience the “spectacle of the city without its noise and clutter” as you glide along the river while learning about the bridges and buildings towering above you. Credit Kevin Miyazaki for The New York Times
    Chicago

    Here are just a few things a passenger is likely to learn on the Chicago Architecture Foundation’s lively, edifying river cruise:

    That the Jewelers Building had elevators that would take tenants’ cars to their office floors, and that the restaurant that had been in the dome at the top was once a speakeasy.

    That the Wrigley Building was inspired by the Giralda tower at the Seville cathedral in Spain.

    That the exterior of Marina City (architect: Bertrand Goldberg) has “no right angles.”

    The 90-minute tour on the Chicago River covers 50 buildings dating from the 1890s to the present; it’s a buoyant hall of fame, with architects as the constant stars: Mies van der Rohe’s AMA Plaza (formerly the IBM Building), an embodiment of his “less is more” philosophy; Adrian Smith’s sleek 92-story Trump International Hotel and Tower; the Art Deco, gold-topped Carbide and Carbon Building, the work of the brothers Hubert and Daniel Burnham Jr.; the 110-story Willis Tower; and Jeanne Gang’s mesmerizing, rippling Aqua Tower.

    There are threads of Chicago history woven throughout, from explorers’ discovery of a river “choked with wild onions” in the 1600s to the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 to the successful efforts of the catalog pioneer Aaron Montgomery Ward to preserve the Lake Michigan waterfront.

    Writing in Condé Nast Traveler in 2007, Blair Kamin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for The Chicago Tribune, said the cruise was “the best, and most beautiful, way to get the feel of the city.” In a recent email, he affirmed that opinion and added that it gave passengers the opportunity “to glide past an array of dazzling skyscrapers and beneath muscular Beaux-Arts bridges. When you ride the river, which is sunken below street level, you’re treated to the spectacle of the city without its noise and clutter.”

    The first trip, however, was not all that smooth. That was in 1983, when a tour created for a rug company “was a bit of a one-way cruise by mistake,” said Lynn J. Osmond, the president of the Chicago Architecture Foundation.

    “They forgot to arrange to have all the bridges open for the route back so there was a bit of scrambling on transportation,” she said with a laugh. “I can tell you, where they dropped off was not a neighborhood back then that you would have wanted to be dropped off at.”

    Now, the cruises run on comfortable, handsome boats, a five-vessel fleet called Chicago’s First Lady. Bloody Marys and I.P.A.s from Chicago’s Revolution Brewing are available at the bar. Volunteer guides for the foundation’s impressive roster of tours are “put through a very strenuous 10-week program,” Ms. Osmond said, and those who do cruises have an additional five days of training.

    Ms. Osmond’s favorite buildings include several near where the cruise begins, close to the corner of Michigan Avenue and Wacker Drive, including the Tribune Tower, the Wrigley Building, the AMA Plaza, the London Guarantee and Accident Building and the Trump Tower, “which until that sign came on was a beautiful building. I couldn’t not make that comment.”

    (The sign — 20-foot letters spelling Trump, added to the building last year — prompted a Twitter set-to between the developer Donald Trump and Mr. Kamin, with Mr. Trump saying Mr. Kamin was a “bad critic” and Mr. Kamin, perhaps invoking the old Spy magazine, calling Mr. Trump a “vulgarian.”)

    Ms. Osmond also said she admired the reflective 333 West Wacker, which follows the curve of the river: “It’s just a beautiful way to see the day: the weather, the river, the contextualism of that area.”

    She speaks from experience; she often takes the tour herself, including once “where it was actually snowing.”

    Last October, it was crystal blue skies on a tour led by Georgia Goldberg, who had the presence and projection of a surprisingly good Maria in a touring production of “The Sound of Music.”

    She reported that before a cold storage warehouse could be turned into the residential Fulton House, it required six months of defrosting. She noted that the architecture of the Tribune Tower was influenced by a tower in Rouen, France.

    And then, near the end of the tour, as the boat turned around and gave passengers a CinemaScope view of the skyline, she paused, and it grew quiet.

    “It’s really being bathed in a wonderful light today, isn’t it?”

    Yes. Yes, it is.

    Chicago Architecture Foundation cruises run from April 4 to Nov. 22 and leave from the Riverside Gardens on the Riverwalk. Tickets are $42 plus tax ($45 plus tax for 7:30 p.m. cruises). Advance purchase recommended. Information: architecture.org/tours.

    STEVE REDDICLIFFE

  2. Photo
    Approaching Alcatraz on the Bridge 2 Bridge cruise in San Francisco Bay. The Golden Gate and Bay bridges are the stars of the 90-minute show. Credit Christopher Stark for The New York Times
    San Francisco

    The Harbor Queen had steamed beyond the Golden Gate Bridge and was turning to re-enter San Francisco Bay when the tumult erupted. At the prow of the excursion boat, a knot of passengers, pointing excitedly and shouting in a half-dozen languages, jostled for prime real estate along the railing as they posed for photos. Who could blame them? This was a tourist’s dream backdrop: the San Francisco skyline, spiking and dipping across the city’s hilly contours, framed by the suspension cables and bold Art Deco towers of the bridge, its most beloved architectural icon.

    It was also the kind of panorama that prompts the advice that I, a longtime resident of the city, always give to visiting friends and family. When you’ve had your fill of trooping uphill and down to see the cute Victorians, I tell them, when you want a deeper understanding of San Francisco’s built environment and how it fits into the surrounding expanse of bay, open sky and distant hills, get off the land and onto the water.

    From time to time, I follow my own advice and hop a ferry or an excursion boat just to break my landlocked routines, to remind myself that I live in a peninsular, maritime city of unique beauty. And if the trip includes a brown-bag lunch, a bottle of Anchor Steam Beer and shout-outs to the city’s architectural landmarks, so much the better.

    That was the lure of the Red and White Fleet’s Bridge 2 Bridge cruise I took in early November, on a day when the autumn sun washed the city in gauzy, golden light. A general sightseeing trip that includes a bevy of architectural landmarks, the cruise travels under the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, known locally as the Bay Bridge, and along the waterfront between them. Recorded narration, delivered in a choice of 16 languages via personal headsets, skips lightly through the region’s natural and human history.

    The 300-passenger, 82-foot Harbor Queen embarked from Fisherman’s Wharf, where the smell of fried food and the scream of gulls greeted the 90 of us on the noon sailing. During the 90-minute trip, the commentary highlighted a hodgepodge of architectural and urban-planning works: the domed pavilion of the Palace of Fine Arts, a 1915 take on a moody, Greco-Roman ruin; the parkland and tidal estuary of Crissy Field, an abandoned army air strip transformed in 2001 into a haven for walkers, cyclists and wildlife; the 853-foot-tall Transamerica pyramid, the city’s tallest building; and perhaps two dozen others. The boat idled near Alcatraz, allowing us to study the grim, three-story cell house that was the world’s largest reinforced concrete building when erected in 1912.

    The bridges clearly were the stars of the cruise. Seeing the Golden Gate from below as it vaulted across a treacherous, mile-wide strait was impressive enough without also hearing that its center span can sway laterally up to 27 feet during high winds. Approaching the two-part Bay Bridge, we had a distant view of the gleaming white eastern span that opened in 2013 — the world’s longest single-tower, self-anchored suspension bridge — and learned enough about its design to satisfy the wonkiest of engineering buffs. As we passed under the 1936 western span, the twin-suspension colossus looming high above us blotted out the sun.

    Toward the end of the cruise, the narration turned to San Francisco’s historical ambivalence toward skyscrapers. In the 1960s, wary of the “Manhattanization” of their skyline, San Franciscans staged a high-rise revolt to preserve the panorama of hills, sky and water that many still feel defines this place more than its buildings do. “‘Our vistas are our one inimitable asset,’” intoned the narrator, quoting a 1970 dispatch by the beloved San Francisco newspaper columnist Herb Caen. “‘When the last building blocks the final view, where then shall we look for the soul of the city?’”

    Mr. Caen, who died in 1997, would hardly recognize today’s tech-boom city, where the skyline is being redefined by a forest of construction cranes and by monoliths like the 1,070-foot Salesforce Tower, which, when completed in 2017, will be the tallest building west of the Mississippi River. But as I disembarked and walked to my car through streets pulsing with life, I felt certain that Mr. Caen would still find that soul.

    The Red and White Fleet’s Bridge 2 Bridge Cruise embarks daily throughout the year from Pier 43½ in San Francisco. As of April 1, the price is $38, $26 for youth (ages 5 to 17). Information: redandwhite.com; 415-673-2900.

    CHRISTOPHER HALL

  3. Photo
    On a tour offered by Classic Harbor Line and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Credit Todd Heisler/The New York Times
    New York

    On a breezy morning in November, a handsome 1920s-style yacht came to a brief stop in the choppy waters off Lower Manhattan — the perfect opportunity for our group of 15 or so passengers to jump up from our comfortable seats and crisscross the glassed-in cabin, cellphone cameras poised.

    In every direction, an icon loomed. Just to the south was the Statue of Liberty, not some tiny figure in the distance, but 225 tons of copper, steel and iron outlined against the cloudless sky. Closer in, Ellis Island basked in the sun, its main building a Beaux-Arts-style wonder of arches and towers and cupolas — “a symbol of the public grandeur that awaited immigrants,” as the architecture critic Paul Goldberger once put it.

    But it was the silvery skyline of Lower Manhattan that held our attention. We edged in for a closer look, as John Kriskiewicz, an associate member of the American Institute of Architects, spoke into a microphone: “Lower Manhattan is the oldest part of the city, but also where some of the newest architecture is.”

    Such observations — and he offered several — made it easy to think of the city as a palimpsest, a place where the old makes way for the new, but never really gives up the ghost. We had already sailed past a few examples: industrial buildings transformed into apartments and offices in West Chelsea; a derelict freight line reimagined as the High Line. And now, standing before us was One World Trade Center — at 1,776 feet the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere. Not only was it an homage to what stood there before Sept. 11, 2001, but it was also an indirect reference to a building the Trade Center towers above, the nearby 40 Wall Street, an Art Deco beauty that was itself built to break records as the tallest building in the world some 85 years ago.

    The insights offered by Mr. Kriskiewicz, who also teaches architectural history at Parsons the New School for Design and Yeshiva University, are what made this excursion around Lower Manhattan a genuine learning experience. It is one of several tours organized by Classic Harbor Line and the New York Chapter of the A.I.A. (The newest, a cruise through the waterways of Fresh Kills Landfill, is scheduled to begin in April.) All tours are guided by A.I.A. members, all depart from Chelsea Piers (later this year some cruises will depart from Brooklyn Bridge Park Marina), and all are aboard motorized yachts that offer an experience that is, according to the cruise line’s website, “wrapped in turn-of-the-century tradition.”

    Indeed, our 80-foot-long vessel, the Manhattan, did possess a certain nostalgic elegance. If you have an hour and a half and $46 to spare, you, too, can sit back in the climate-controlled cabin, with its teak floors and Oriental-style carpets, and sip a free glass of wine or Champagne as the urban landscape slips by. Passengers can also venture onto the deck, not an appealing option on that chilly fall day. Our group of tourists and New Yorkers opted to stay inside, listening to Mr. Kriskiewicz as we sailed from Chelsea Piers up to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, then back down the Hudson River, around the southern tip of Manhattan, and into the bustling East River, with its ferries and sailboats and helicopters buzzing overhead, before turning back the way we came.

    Along the way, Mr. Kriskiewicz pointed out various enigmas and oddities: The purpose of those towers above the Holland Tunnel? To house the fans that ventilate carbon monoxide so drivers don’t choke when they drive beneath the Hudson. At 200 11th Avenue in West Chelsea, designed by Annabelle Selldorf’s architectural firm, “you can drive into an elevator and park in your private sky garage.” At South Street Seaport, the tall-masted ships docked there reminded Mr. Kriskiewicz that the word “skyscraper” was once used to describe the masts. It wasn’t until the late 19th century, said Mr. Kriskiewicz, that the term as applied to buildings appeared in print.

    Making our way back around Lower Manhattan, we again took in the crowd of multigenerational buildings that seemed to jostle right up to the edge of Battery Park, as if vying to get the best view of us. It was an oddly intimate encounter with the ever-evolving metropolis — the kind of encounter best experienced from the water, preferably with the insights of someone like Mr. Kriskiewicz ringing in your ear.

    Departing from Pier 62 at Chelsea Piers (West 22nd Street and the Hudson River), the 90-minute Lower Manhattan Architecture tour, offered by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and Classic Harbor Line, is available from April to mid-November. Tickets, $46 for adults, $32 for students. For information on this and other architecture- and infrastructure-themed cruises, visit Classic Harbor Line, sail-nyc.com.

    SUZANNE MacNEILLE