The Hand & The Eye: Chicago's $50M Magic Theater Opens

A $50 million magic theater opens Saturday in Streeterville, promising Chicago a first-of-its-kind immersive experience that its founder says has no real equivalent anywhere in the world.

The Hand & The Eye, housed inside the 35,000-square-foot McCormick Mansion at 100 E. Ontario St., asks guests to dress in cocktail attire, pay at least $225 a ticket, and surrender the next three hours to a warren of secret passageways, intimate magic performances, five performance spaces, two dining rooms, and seven bars. The $225 entry includes a $75 dining credit.

Glen Tullman, the entrepreneur behind the project, spent years and $50 million building it out. He said the venue doesn’t operate like any magic theater audiences might already know.

“There are big theaters that you can go to and see magic performed,” Tullman said. “That’s not what this is about. You’re a part of the magic. You’re experiencing it yourself. It’s happening to you in your hands and around you.”

That distinction matters to how the whole space works. There’s no main stage. There’s no seated audience arranged in rows watching a performer from a distance. Guests move through the McCormick Mansion’s rooms, encountering highly skilled magicians up close, sometimes in spaces that hold only a handful of people at a time. It’s built around proximity, not spectacle.

The mansion itself has been dressed in 1920s-era detail. Each room carries different wallpaper and design elements. Velvet and gold accents run throughout, and the building’s network of secret passageways is part of the experience, not just decoration. Tullman and his team have spent years restoring and redesigning the property to fit the vision.

According to Chicago Sun-Times reporting, Tullman pointed to the Magic Castle in Los Angeles as the closest comparable experience. That members-only club requires guests to be invited or accompanied by a member, and it’s generally considered the gold standard for serious magic in the United States. Tullman’s position is that The Hand & The Eye surpasses it in size and scope, and that nothing quite like it exists anywhere else.

The venue sits on the Magnificent Mile, within blocks of the Wrigley Building and Water Tower Place, on a stretch of Michigan Avenue that has seen a complicated decade. Retail vacancies climbed after the pandemic, and foot traffic took years to recover. A high-end entertainment destination with a built-in dress code and a bar program doesn’t fit the traditional Mag Mile retail mold, but that’s the point. Tullman isn’t selling merchandise. He’s selling an evening.

Memberships will be available soon. Members will get access to additional rooms inside the mansion, though full details on pricing and tiers haven’t been released yet. The membership structure echoes the Magic Castle model in some respects, creating different levels of access and a sense of belonging to something exclusive.

The Illinois Restaurant Association has tracked the shift toward experiential dining and entertainment concepts across Chicago over the past several years, and The Hand & The Eye represents one of the most capital-intensive bets on that trend the city has seen. At $50 million, it’s a serious commitment to a format that has no direct local predecessor.

For context on the venue’s home, the National Register of Historic Places lists dozens of Chicago properties with similar architectural pedigrees, and the McCormick Mansion’s 1920s bones give Tullman’s design team material that a purpose-built venue couldn’t replicate.

The cocktail attire requirement isn’t incidental. Tullman has built a place where the dress code signals the tone before guests ever walk through the door. It’s an escalation of commitment, a way of telling visitors that what happens inside is different from a casual night out.

Saturday’s opening puts the concept to its first real test with a paying public. The magicians are booked, the bars are stocked, the passageways are waiting.

“You’re experiencing it yourself,” Tullman said. “It’s happening to you.”