Landscape Information
Situated within Washington Park at its 57th Street entrance, this cultural campus comprises two buildings designed by D.H. Burnham & Co. and a sunken lawn to the north. After earlier efforts to organize a museum devoted to African American history, this institution was founded in 1961 by Margaret Goss Burroughs and her husband Charles in their South Michigan Avenue home. In 1973 it relocated to the former South Park Commission headquarters (1910), and was named for Jean Baptist Point DuSable, the fur trader of Haitian descent who is considered Chicago’s first non-Native resident.
The main building overlooks a paved, balustraded terrace and sunken lawn designed in quadrants, which hosts the museum’s sculpture garden of works by African American artists. Framed to the north and east with allées of sycamore and flowering trees, a longitudinal path aligns with the museum’s entrance and is bisected by a second, allowing access via shallow staircases from all four directions. In 1992 architect Wendall Campbell designed a 25,000-square-foot-wing to the main building; this addition was dedicated to Harold Washington, the city’s first African American mayor. In the early 2000s the museum was granted a lease from the Chicago Park District for a second Burnham-designed structure: the Stables and Roundhouse Building (1880), located south of 57th Street. Landscape architects Site Design Group were engaged in 2017 to rehabilitate this building into a flexible event space and improve vehicular and pedestrian access to the campus. To the east, enclosed by a brick wall, a 15,000-square-foot parking lot was converted into a courtyard with overhead catenary lighting and four rectangular planters punctuating its central axis.
Both buildings are contributing features of the Chicago Park Boulevard System Historic District listed in in the National Register in 2018 and are also contributing features in the Washington Park nomination listed in 2004.
