Chicago Cultural Center was completed in 1897 as Chicago’s first central public library. The building was designed to impress with the most sumptuous materials, such as rare imported marbles, polished brass, fine hardwoods, and mosaics of Favrile glass, mother-of-Pearl and colored stone, to create an architectural showplace. On the south side of the building, the world’s largest stained glass Tiffany dome - 38 feet in diameter with some 30,000 pieces of glass - in its original splendor.