Chicago's Landscape Legacy
“The advantages of improved Nature are obvious. A Saturday in Lincoln Park alone is sufficient to establish its superiority over wild and uncultivated Nature. You have hills which are not too high to climb, sheets of water whereon your boats may float with the security, if not the grace, of a swan; banks to recline on without being haunted by the terror of snakes or black bugs; good roads to drive on that are never dusty or too muddy; rustic bridges to cross without the danger of breaking through… the delusion of bucolic pleasures without the stern reality of bucolic fatigue, monotony, and stupidity.”
–Chicago Tribune, 1873
Before the Blaze
Derived from the Central Algonquian language of the Miami and Illinois Tribes, the word “chicago” referred to a species of wild leek found in the watershed of the river that empties into Lake Michigan (now the Chicago River). The river, like most in the region, was originally a sluggish, meandering watercourse that drained the wet prairie, dry grasslands, and dense forests of the mid-continent. The flat landscape was pockmarked with lakes, swamps, and bogs, as a remnant of glacial retreat. In the wake of this activity, rocky, poorly drained soils and moraines spread across limestone bedrock that lay close to the surface. Grasslands and oak/hickory forests attracted large mammals such as bison and elk, which in turn drew humans. Game trails along ridges and sandy beaches became routes navigated by Native peoples, followed by French traders who arrived in the Great Lakes region in the 1670s. From 1682 to 1763, the French laid claim to the area and in 1779 Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, a trader of African descent, established a permanent trading post and farm on the north bank of the Chicago River.
In 1795, the American government acquired a parcel of land at the mouth of the Chicago River and by 1808, established Fort Dearborn on a hill to protect the port where the river flowed into the lake. The palisaded fort was burned by Native peoples in 1812 and rebuilt four years later, remaining a military outpost until the 1830s. In 1837, the 54-acre military reservation was decommissioned and a twenty-acre section of the land was designated a public park (the precursor to today’s 319-acre Grant Park). In 1836, officials declared that the lakefront would be maintained as “Public Ground—A Common to Remain Open, Clear, And Free of Any Building, or Other Obstruction Whatever.” A year later, the City of Chicago was incorporated with the motto Urbs in Horto (City in a Garden).
In the 1830s, the first streets in Chicago were laid out by surveyor James Thompson. His grided plat was informed by Thomas Jefferson’s nationwide Land Ordinance of 1785, which ignored topography, natural landscape features, and cultural precedents in favor of straight lines running in the cardinal directions, forming blocks based on one-square mile. As the grid expanded with Chicago’s growth, standardized lot sizes and road widths were adopted, leading to spatial homogeneity. Land speculators, attempting to attract people to their development projects, often reserved small parcels in residential areas for use as privately owned, publicly accessible parks. Washington Square (no longer extant) and Vernon Square were early examples of this practice. In 1847, the Chicago Horticultural Society was established by William Ogden, the city’s first mayor. Hosting exhibitions and disseminating information on botany and gardening, the Society comprised Chicago’s elite, including doctors, real estate developers, and businessmen. It wasn’t until 1854 that the first municipal park was established, the eleven-acre Union Square Park.
In 1836, work commenced on the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, which would eventually stretch 96 miles to connect the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River. Opened in 1848, the 60-foot-wide canal, dug primarily by Irish, German, and Dutch immigrants who then settled in Chicago, traversed the center of the city. Although it accommodated passenger service in its early days (displaced by the Chicago & Rock Island Railroad, completed in 1854), the canal was primarily used for trade. Lumberyards, meatpacking plants, and stockyards were established in Bridgeport, where the canal met the Chicago River. In 1865, just south of Bridgeport, the 475-acre Union Stock Yard opened.
Throughout the second half of the century, railroads linked Chicago to the rest of the country. The city—a frontier metropolis of nearly 300,000 residents in the 1870s—established itself as a hub for freight and passenger rail; headquarters for several railroads were established in Chicago and it became a manufacturing center for locomotives and freight cars. So-called “suburban utopias” emerged along the railroads, while heavy industry and agricultural centers took advantage of the freight lines to move raw and processed goods. Horse-drawn streetcars appeared in the 1850s and, within a decade, streetcars simplified commuting, first to the outer neighborhoods and then to the hinterlands. In 1857, the Lake Forest suburb, 28 miles south of Chicago, was designed by landscape gardener Almerin Hotchkiss with a plan that was sensitive to the site’s topography and scenic qualities. By the 1880s, such railroad suburbs as Franklin Park, Kenilworth, and Evanston made it possible for people to work in Chicago but live in the idyllic countryside, escaping noise and pollution. In 1863, the Riverside Improvement Company was founded by the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad and acquired a1,600-acre parcel, west of downtown. Landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and Calvert Vaux laid out a plan that included large lots, hotels, and curvilinear streets that followed the site’s natural topography. Sixteen miles south of the city, railroad magnate George Pullman established his 3,500-acre company town, designed by architect Solon S. Beman and landscape architect Nathan Barrett in 1879. Riverside was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1970. Pullman’s development was designated a National Monument in 2015 and seven years later legislation altered the designation, renaming it Pullman National Historical Park.
In 1866, the Chicago Times published a plan that promoted a 2,240-acre system of interconnected parks and boulevards. As the plan (eventually reduced to 1,800 acres) was being implemented three years later, voters passed legislation to create the Lincoln, South, and West Park Commissions in the city’s three districts. In 1867, Dr. John Rauch was appointed the superintendent of the Board of Health. Addressing the cholera epidemic, Rauch recommended the removal of City Cemetery, which was laid out in 1836 near the shore of Lake Michigan. Bodies were reinterred at Calvary, Rose Hill, and Graceland cemeteries and the 60-acre lakefront property became Lincoln Park, designed by landscape gardener Swain Nelson and Olof Benson. The designers capitalized on the former cemetery’s inherent qualities to lay out formal and informal areas with lawns, pavilions, lakes, walks, and carriage roads. Zoological gardens, memorials, and a conservatory came later. In the West Park System, architect William Le Baron Jenney developed plans for three parks: Each park—the 206-acre North (now Humboldt) Park, the 185-acre Middle (now Garfield) Park, and the 174-acre South (now Douglass) Park—included a dominant water feature, broad greenswards, masses of informal tree plantings, and curvilinear carriage roads and pedestrian paths. The parks were connected by a system of axial, tree-lined boulevards, which terminated within the parks at fountains and memorials after passing through formal gates. For the South Park System, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., and Calvert Vaux developed designs for Washington Park and Jackson Park, united by the Midway Plaisance. Their plans, which called for a pastoral collection of greenswards, water features, and meandering carriage drives, were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. That conflagration, originating in a barn on DeKoven Street and blazing for almost two days, destroyed three-and-a-half square miles, leaving a third of Chicago’s population without homes and approximately 300 people dead.
From the Ashes
In the aftermath of the fire, Chicago was quickly rebuilt, expanding its boundaries in all directions. Debris from the fire was deposited into a lagoon near Lake Michigan, providing the land for the construction of Grant Park designed by Edward Bennett. In 1872, H.W.S. Cleveland was engaged by the South Parks Commission to develop the earlier plans created by Olmsted and Vaux, although these were scaled back due to financial constraints. Cleveland also made recommendations about Chicago’s boulevards: hoping to break the rigid homogeneity of the city grid, he suggested that radiating, tree-lined avenues be laid out on the diagonal of the grid to create commercial, cultural, and residential blocks.
In the 1880s, plans for the commemoration of Christopher Columbus’s transatlantic voyage of 1492–1493 were underway. Although New York, St. Louis, and Washington, DC, were initially considered, Congress eventually selected Chicago as the location of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Architect Daniel H. Burnham was selected to manage the creation of the fairgrounds and its buildings. Burnham worked with several noted architects and designers, such as Richard Morris Hunt and Sophia Hayden, to design the palatial buildings that would comprise the Exposition’s neoclassical “White City,” and collaborated with Olmsted, Sr., to develop the grounds at Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance. The commission provided Olmsted the opportunity to realize the design he had created with Vaux two decades earlier. Some 27 million people visited the exposition, which set the precedent for the Beaux-Arts style of landscape design that dominated City Beautiful projects for the next 50 years.
With Chicago’s population exceeding 1.5 million people by the turn of the century, the state legislature authorized the acquisition of more parks in 1899, and in again 1903. Lake Shore Drive, originally laid out by Nelson and Benson in the 1870s, was extended to connect the Lincoln and the South Park systems. Neighborhood parks such as Wicker, Jefferson, and Vernon were enhanced with tracks, pools, field houses, and play equipment—some of which was designed by Olmsted Brothers. In 1909, Burnham and Bennett developed the Plan of Chicago, which proposed a City Beautiful scheme for the city. Goals outlined in the plan” included connecting surrounding suburbs to the downtown with concentric and radial boulevards, consolidating rail networks into a few stations, and developing a twenty-mile-long linear shoreline park along Lake Michigan.
This period also marked the evolution of the Prairie Style, a distinctly Midwestern tradition of landscape architecture developed by Jens Jensen, O.C. Simonds, and Alfred Caldwell. The style poetically interprets natural ecologies of the American Midwest and emphasizes horizontal expanses, outdoor rooms, native plants, and meandering, stream-like water features. Exemplary projects completed during this period include Jensen’s designs for Humboldt Park, Columbus Park, and the Garfield Park Conservatory; Simonds’s redesign of Graceland Cemetery (earlier developed in the Picturesque Style by Swain Nelson and H.W.S. Cleveland); and Caldwell’s respective designs of the Lily Pool in Lincoln Park and Skyline Park, the latter which surrounds the 70-story Lake Point Tower.
For the next two decades, more than $300 million was spent on the realization of various components of Burnham and Bennett’s plan until the Great Depression halted its pace in the 1930s. New Deal programs such as the Works Progress Administration (WPA) created opportunities for some of Chicago’s unemployed (some 700,000 people, by 1932). Among other projects, the WPA was involved in the completion of Lake Shore Drive, the construction of the Outer Drive Bridge, and the development of new parkland, such as Promontory Point designed by Caldwell at the southern edge of Burnham Park. The Civilian Conservation Corps worked with the National Park Service to restore historic locks along the Illinois and Michigan Canal.
The US entry into World War II created new opportunities for employment in Chicago, as manufacturing industries kept pace with the military’s need for war goods. Thousands of soldiers were stationed at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in North Chicago and nearby at Fort Sheridan. The Douglas Aircraft Company plant in the northwest part of the city, decommissioned after the war, was transformed into O’Hare Airport by C.F. Murphy Associates (and later by I.M. Pei Associates) to alleviate traffic at Midway Airport.
During the Great Migration, from the turn of the twentieth century up through the 1970s, approximately six million African Americans relocated from the South to Northern, Midwestern, and Western states to escape racial violence and segregationist laws. Chicago thus witnessed an influx of nearly 500,000 African American residents. In 1910 the number of African American inhabitants had measured just two percent of the city’s total population; by 1975 that figure rose to 38 percent. Many African Americans initially settled in the city’s South Side between Cottage Grove Avenue and State Street and, as migration continued, the community expanded southward, encompassing Washington Park. In 1930 James Gentry, a theater editor for the African American-owned Chicago Bee, named the neighborhood Bronzeville, which by postwar years, had become a center for African American art, culture, and business—often described as Chicago’s Harlem Renaissance.
Looking to the Future
By the mid-twentieth century and later, the Chicago Park District also managed more than 6,000 acres of land comprising some 169 parks. Continuing to expand in the post-War era the city embraced Modernism. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Alfred Caldwell collaborated on design for the Illinois Institute of Technology in the 1940s, which they envisioned as a “campus in the park.” Between 1962 and 1967, landscape architect Dan Kiley developed his intimately scaled South Garden at the Art Institute of Chicago and also designed a park on the waterfront, named for Milton Lee Olive, IIIinois, in 1966. Concurrently historic preservation and urban renewal initiatives emerged across the country, resulting in a hybridized blend of several public spaces in Chicago. In 1989, following the discovery of thousands of plans, reports, and correspondence related to the city’s parks, the Chicago Park District established the Office of Research and Planning to guide future development and research.
The development of Chicago’s landscapes continued apace throughout the late-twentieth century and into the new millennium. In the late 1980s, more than 500 playgrounds were rehabilitated by the Chicago Park District and between 1989 and 2011 during the incumbency of Mayor Richard M. Daley several of the city’s historic places were also rehabilitated. Daley promoted the development of new parks and open spaces, including the 24.5-acre Millennium Park and Site Design Group’s Ping Tom Memorial Park. The former, established in 2004 on a site cluttered with parking lots, railway lines, and a station operated by the Illinois Central Railroad, includes the three-acre Lurie Garden, designed by landscape architect Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, plantsman Piet Oudolf, and others.
Four years after Millennium Park opened, the city commissioned Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) to prepare a framework plan for a linear park paralleling the southern bank of the Chicago River. Over the next seven years the city engaged several firms—including Sasaki, Jacobs/Ryan Associates, Site Design Group, and Ross Barney Architects—to complete the park. Named the Chicago Riverwalk, this park is unified throughout by a continuous, paved walkway that provides uninterrupted views of the opposite shore, with skyscrapers serving as a backdrop. At approximately the same time, the Chicago Park District and the Trust for Public Land engaged Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates landscape architects to transform a former elevated rail line into a park. Completed in 2015 The 606 (named for the first three digits of the local zip code) connects the neighborhoods of Wicker Park, Bucktown, Humboldt Park, and Logan Square and affords Chicago residents diverse recreational opportunities. Other transformative projects include the Wild Mile (designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Omni Workshop (now Greenprint Partners), and Kenwood Gardens (designed by Site Design Group). Each provides natural and cultural amenities to their respective neighborhoods and has helped revitalize once-neglected areas of Chicago.
Today, the Chicago Park District manages more than 8,800 acres in more than 600 parks, demonstrating Chicago’s commitment to its motto, City in a Garden. The character of the city, at once lifting into the sky and spreading across the landscape, is balanced by the vast expanses of Lake Michigan to one side and the flat prairie on the other.