Chicago’s famous skyline has already welcomed the 1,191-foot-tall Vista Tower, which will open its doors in the spring and officially become the city’s third tallest building. The hard-to-miss development features 192 luxury hotel rooms, 396 condominiums, and a stacked frustum designed by Chicago’s own starchitect Jeanne Gang. Vista Tower broke ground in 2016 and is one of downtown’s most anticipated high-rise projects.

Although Jeanne Gang’s new Global Terminal and SOM’s satellite concourses are still years from breaking ground, 2020 will see work on the $8.5 billion O’Hare modernization project steadily ramp up. Construction on the 10-gate expansion of Terminal 5 is kicking into full swing. New runway 9C/27C will open in the second half of 2020 and efforts to extend runway 9R/27L will continue through 2021. O’Hare’s Airport Transit System, which closed for modernization work, is also set to reopen in early 2020.

After surviving years of vacancy and demolition threats, Cook County Hospital’s historic main building will start a new life in 2020 as a Hyatt House and a Hyatt Place hotel. The $132 million project restores the 106-year-old building’s Beaux-Arts architectural details and turns the dilapidated interior into 210 guest rooms. The adaptive reuse of the main building is part of a larger multi-phase effort to redevelop the county-owned land on Near West Side into a mixed-use campus known as Harrison Square.

The multi-phase Wolf Point development will have a big year in 2020. For starters, the 60-story, 679-foot apartment tower at Wolf Point East will welcome residents to its 698 rental units in the first half of the year. If that wasn’t enough, crews are expected to soon break ground on the third and final piece of the Wolf Point puzzle: the 60-story 813-foot-tall office high-rise known as Salesforce Tower Chicago. Both buildings come from architecture firm Pelli Clarke Pelli and include a publicly accessible riverwalk.

Related Midwest plans to get started on its mixed-use Equinox Hotel and apartment tower slated for 725 W. Randolph Street as early as this summer. Although previously approved by the city, the West Loop proposal recently returned with a new design that includes a 250-foot-tall office building rising just south of the 550-foot main tower with 370 rental units and 240 hotel rooms. The latest changes will require a zoning amendment before work can begin.

The construction around Union Station shows no signs of slowing down in the year ahead. Work continues on the new Clinton Street entrance as well as a new multi-level food hall in the fire-damaged Fred Harvey lunchroom space. There’s also zoning in place to convert the station’s upper floors into hotel rooms. Across the street from the historic train depot, BMO Tower will start its skyward climb at the former site of an Amtrak-owned parking garage. The 700-foot-tall office building is on track to open in early 2022.

While the Navy Pier Flyover project has been under construction since 2014 and delayed more than times than we’d care to count, the lakefront path is expected to finally wrap up its third and final phase this spring. When complete, the $64 million elevated trail will allow cyclists and pedestrians to avoid automobiles—and, ideally, each other—between Ohio Street Beach and the south bank of the Chicago River.

A key component of the CTA’s massive $2.1 billion Red and Purple Line Modernization (RPM) Program, the Belmont Bypass replaces a congested junction where the Purple, Brown, and Red lines intersect and often cause delays with a new bridge-like structure. Work on the bypass recently kicked into high gear as crews began digging 70-foot holes to support the project’s foundations, according to Block Club Chicago. The Belmont Bypass will open in 2021 while other parts of the RPM project, such as the reconstruction of four CTA stations, won’t wrap up until 2025.

While the massive Near South Side development known as The 78 is estimated to take two decades to complete, one piece of the project—a new roadway known as the Wells-Wentworth Connector—is already underway. Protected on both sides by a tree-lined parkway that separates car, bike, and pedestrian traffic, the Wells-Wentworth Connector will bridge Wells Street’s South Loop dead-end to Chinatown’s Wentworth Avenue. Related Midwest, the developer behind The 78 megaprojects, says it expects the new roadway to be completed by the end of 2020.

The Moody Bible Institute is looking to cash-in on a 10-acre plot of land next to its Near North Side campus—a move that could open a large swath of real estate to new development. Combined with a zoning change from the city, the properties could support up to 5.3 million square feet of buildings.

Could 2020 be the year the Obama Presidential Center moves forward? We’ll see. The $500 million campus was supposed to start construction in 2018, but saw that timeline slip due to external factors such an ongoing federal historic review and a lawsuit challenging the project’s location in Jackson Park. Even if the Obama Presidential Center doesn’t break ground this year, we should have a better idea about its timing in the months ahead. Stay tuned.

This project has Chicago skyscraper enthusiasts waiting with bated breath. Related Midwest has yet to show what it has planned for the site of the defunct Chicago Spire ever since 42nd Ward Alderman Brendan Reilly rejected its earlier proposal in 2018. Reilly told the Chicago Tribune that the new design would be revealed as soon as the first quarter of 2020, so the wait shouldn’t last too much longer.