WYCC's operations were housed with WTTW and WFMT in the Renée Crown Public Media Center, located at 5400 North Saint Louis Avenue (adjacent to the main campus of Northeastern Illinois University) in the city's North Park neighborhood; WYCC and WTTW shared transmitter facilities atop the Willis Tower on South Wacker Drive in the Chicago Loop.

[5] First conceived in 1953 and debuting in September 1955 as Chicago's first non-commercial educational television station, WTTW began to experience growing pains by the early 1960s.

Gradually moving away from its original mission of providing classroom instructional courses as more and more of its broadcast day was filled first with programming from National Educational Television (NET) and those distributed by other member stations, the idea of a second station seemed like the perfect answer to provide additional sources for the displaced educational programming.

[6] In October 1962, the FCC, at the request of WTTW's owner, then known as the Chicago Educational Television Association (CETA), changed channel 20's status to reserved noncommercial.

[12] The WXXW antenna had been intended to be placed on the Field Building, from which WTTW had broadcast, but a proposed skyscraper to be built by First National Bank of Chicago created possible multipath interference issues for both stations.

[13] However, the planned expansion of educational television for schools was carried out by retaining some instructional programs on WTTW and purchasing time on the other UHF station in the city, WCIU-TV (channel 26).

Plagued by a weak signal and a schedule filled with what former WTTW station manager Edward Morris called "talking heads and a blackboard",[17] WXXW limped along until it quietly went dark in 1974.

[21] It broadcast for 52 hours a week with an annual budget of just $275,000 and 20 staffers;[22] Elynne Chaplik Aleskow, the general manager, was the first woman to hold that post at a Chicago TV station.

[28] Irma Blanco, at the time a morning co-host on Chicago radio, hosted the arts program Absolute Artistry.

[36] In 2013, WYCC debuted In the Loop, a half-hour weekly public affairs show on Thursday evenings, hosted by Barbara Pinto and Chris Bury (both of whom formerly served as correspondents for ABC News);[37][38] Robin Robinson and Lauren Cohn (both former anchors at WFLD) joined the program as rotating co-hosts starting in September 2015.

[43] Not only was the bid much lower than many had expected, but the potential windfall would be further eroded by continuing expenses, as the station's lease for antenna space at the John Hancock Center ran through 2029.

[44] On September 13, 2017, WYCC announced in a letter to contributors that it would shut down October 25, 2017; most of the station's staff had been laid off following the conclusion of the auction.

The station lost $732,000 in 2016 in its non-operating budget, despite funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the state of Illinois, and private donors.

[1] On December 7, 2017, Window to the World Communications, owner of WTTW, announced that it was seeking to purchase WYCC from the City Colleges of Chicago, in a move that would put the two stations back under the same corporate umbrella.

[57] In May 2022, Window to the World Communications filed an application to dissolve the WTTW-WYCC channel sharing agreement on June 1, 2022, announcing that the WYCC license would be surrendered after that date.