The Ledge transforms how visitors experience Chicago. At 1,353 feet up, The Ledge’s glass boxes extend out 4.3 feet from the skyscraper’s Skydeck on the 103rd floor, providing never-before-seen views of the city.

The tower is a world-renowned building, a Chicago icon. The eighth-tallest building in the world, it remains the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, standing 1,450 feet and 110 stories tall.

Willis Tower is the premier corporate office building in Chicago, home to more than 100 companies including prominent law, insurance, transportation and financial services. The iconic building is the tallest in the Western Hemisphere, encompassing more than 4.5 million square feet, including its Skydeck and 103rd floor glass viewing platform, The Ledge, which attracts more than 1.3 million visitors every year.

Willis Tower, Skydeck, and The Ledge Fast Facts

• The hundreds of forehead prints visitors left behind each week on Skydeck windows served as this inspiration for The Ledge.
• The Ledge boxes can each bear about 4-1/2 metric tons of weight, and adventurers who trust that statistic enough to prove it can often be found jumping and bounding around the entirely translucent enclosures as Chicago's heavy traffic and infrastructure bustle below.
• The Ledge’s glass panels weight 1,500 pounds apiece, and each box is comprised of three layers of half-inch thick glass laminated into one seamless unit.
• In addition to serving 1.3 million tourists per year in its 4.5+ million square feet of space, Willis Tower is home to more than 100 companies, including prominent law, insurance, transportation, and financial services.
• The Ledge's glass boxes retract into the Skydeck main floor for easy maintenance, probably mostly cleaning off the 974 dead birds that must fly into them every month.
• The Moonwalk is the most popular dance performed on The Ledge, followed closely by the Running Man. Riverdance clocks in at a distant third.
• Bringing people who are afraid of heights to The Ledge is not recommended, unless you are mean-spirited or really don't like them. In which case, you should probably just take them here.
• Willis Tower was known as Sears Tower for decades, until the 30th anniversary of Diff'rent Strokes, at which point it was rightfully renamed.