The Corn Latitudes

Summer Retreats For Kids

​

Jane Addams and her colleagues at Hull House advanced the notion that cities were terrible places for children. The countryside like the one she grew up in in Cedarville in Stephenson County was where kids ought to be raised, and, as noted, Addams devoted considerable energies to bringing her countryside into the city in the forms of parks and playgrounds

Nothing, however, beats the real thing. Many settlement house operators in the late 19th and early 20th centuries urged that kids be sent into the countryside for a week or two, as one might air out a musty mattress. The result was what amounted to rest cures for city kids. 

​

These rural excursions were organized by private philanthropy, for the most part. The Gads Hill Settlement House in Pilsen held a summer encampment each year in Glencoe on the North Shore beginning in 1900, which entertained city women and their children until 1941. The 116-acre Camp Algonquin is a riverside retreat on the western shore of the Fox River near its namesake town in McHenry County, established in 1907 the Chicago Tribune and the Bureau of Charities. The focus of the camping program was giving city kids access to sunshine, fresh air and decent food, although, like all of Chicagoland’s restoration summer facilities, it gradually expanded its menu to include education, sports, and social work counseling.

​

In 1911, Louise deKoven Bowen—the Mrs. Joseph T. Bowen, who was president and treasurer of Hull House—purchased the 72 acres that would become the Joseph T. Bowen Country Club and donated the property to Hull-House. For more than 50 years, it was used as a summer camp for inner-city children and their mothers on two-week retreats. The regimen would be familiar to anyone who endured summer camp, with swimming, tennis, baseball, story-telling around the campfire. In time the camp welcomed those whose ills were physical rather than social.

​

After Hull House removed its camp program to Wisconsin, the Bowen Country Club was bought in 1963 by the Waukegan Park District and renamed Bowen Park. Lilac Cottage, which Bowen had built in 1928 to provide herself and Jane Addams suitable quarters on their visits, is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

​

A more ambitious program—a resettlement initiative, really—was the Allendale Farm School in the Lake County resort town of Lake Villa, founded in 1897 as a refuge for abandoned boys from Chicago. There founder Edward Bradley undertook what the Federal Writers Project's 1939 guide to Illinois described as ”an experiment in practical philanthropy.” Bradley set up working farm where the boys (when not in classes) grew crops, including strawberries and blueberries, raised poultry, herded and milked cows, and tended the horses and other livestock. More than a farm, Allendale was a mini-society with its own economy, its own government and its own money, in which the boys paid for their room and board. They attended school too, and in their off-hours indulged in the usual improving recreations. The Allendale Farm survives as the Allendale Association, which runs a co-ed school on the grounds for adolescent victims of neglect, substance abuse, or emotional problems.

​

Lakefront parks

​

Lakefront parks of one sort or another had been urged as early as 1841 but the city would not be capable of so adorning itself for many years to come. Building a lakefront park is tricky business, for example, when one is never quite sure where the lakefront is; parks construction had to await—or, in many cases, was the pretext for—the engineered stabilization of the lake shore. In places where buildings already crowded the shore, parks could be built only on new land, created by filling in the shallow near-shore lake bottom.

​

It took decades to do—indeed, the work is not done yet—but the resulting system of lakefront parks is the pride of Chicago’s lakefront, indeed the pride of the city in many ways. The parks are immensely popular, and arguably the feature that lifts daily life above the Atlantas and Dallases of this world.

​

Daniel Burnham has been embraced as a hero of the common man by populist parks activists as the author of the recreational lakefront. There is irony in this. He foresaw it as a promenade ground for the middle and upper middle classes, not the softball-and-fireworks kind of place it has become. He also is credited with having created what many regard as that lakefront’s centerpiece—Grant Park, opposite the Loop between Randolph and McFetridge Drive, an open expanse of 319 acres of gardens and music amphitheaters and playgrounds on some of the most desirable real estate in the country.

​

Grant is sometimes referred to as Chicago’s “lakefront garden” but it more often described as “Chicago’s front yard,” and it is, since the American front yard is largely ornamental space that is seldom used. That is not the kind of park Burnham intended. In his 1909 Plan, Grant Park was to be a campus of civic and cultural buildings with the Field Museum of Natural History as its center­piece at the eastern terminus of Congress Parkway, where Buckingham Fountain now stands.

​

To understand why those buildings are not there, one needs to hear the story of Aaron Montgomery Ward. The parcel of lakefront between Madison and Randolph streets was marked with the notation “forever to remain vacant of buildings.” This grassy strip was transferred to the city during the 1840s. Montgomery Ward built his company headquarters in 1899 on Michigan Avenue between Madison and Washington. (The building is still there, in truncated form.) The avenue also was a prestigious residential and institutional address—the symphony hall, the library, and key social clubs were located there.

​

These buildings faced what had been known since 1847 as Lake Park. It was aptly named; the shore was then still exposed to lake waves, with the result that erosion continually threatened to turn the park into a pond. The construction in 1852 of a railroad trestle across the park’s lakeward side offered protection from eroding waves and storms, and converted the in-shore waters into a placid lagoon. Under various aegis and for various reasons, that lagoon began to be filled in.

​

The new land thus created was undeniably convenient in an overcrowded  downtown. It was used as a dumping ground for building rubble and dredged sand. It also became a dumping ground for buildings like a municipal armory, whose contributions to city defense were minimal but which served as hall at which First Ward aldermen staged notorious annual balls whose belles were the prostitutes that then populated the downtown district. Under indifferent city stewardship the Lake Park acquired a generally ramshackle appearance that was a civic embarrassment to all save the men who were responsible for creating it.

​

Ward, who overlooked the site from his skyscraper’s offices, sued first in 1890 for a cleanup. The basis of his suit was the 1839 blueprint for the harbor development drawn up by the commissioners of the Illinois and Michigan Canal that the public ground at Randolph Street and Michigan Avenue is "forever to remain vacant." Ward ended up going to the Illinois Supreme Court no fewer than four times between 1890 and 1911, and won each time. He had good lawyers (his campaigns cost him about $700,000 in today's dollars) but his arguments were less good. The commissioners most likely made that stipulation to guarantee land for the future expansion of public works in what was then still a working harbor—a 1834 woodcut shows the water area immediately off Lake Park reserved for wharves and slips—but the language was construed by the courts as justifying a ban on buildings.

​

As a result of the decisions, “free and clear” was interpreted in visual terms, which means that the rulings protect what is now sometimes referred to as the viewscapes of the lake. No structure—even one erected for public purpose—could cheat the Michigan Avenue grandees of their expensively acquired views. In 1910, Ward sued to bar construction of the Field Museum, which was originally to be built according to Burnham’s plan where Buckingham Fountain now stands, facing Congress on one side and the harbor on the other. Ward’s complaint caused the museum to be sited on land that is more remote from the Loop and less accessible by public transit. (In 1911 the South Park Commission had acquired riparian rights from the Illinois Central Railroad that allowed it begin filling the waters immediately south of the existing park; it was on this new land, eventually named Burnham Park, that the Field, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium are located.)

​

Additions to the existing Art Institute were allowed under the court’s provisions, but only if they stood no taller than the parent building. One result was that the museum’s new Goodman Theatre had to be constructed substantially below grade, and even then the Goodman could not be equipped with a fly tower needed to lift scenery from the stage. The Joan W. and Irving B. Harris Theater for Music and Dance, which opened in 2003, also has its working bits below grade. (The band shell by Frank Gehry in Millennium Park was officially declared a work of sculpture to circumvent Park District height limitations on structures in the park.)

​

While Ward fought to preserve the lake views that only the wealthy could afford, he still is usually offered as a champion of the common people. Typical is the 1993 Tribune article that insists that Ward “argued that the 50-acre Lake Park would best be used as open green space for all Chicagoans.” In fact he argued his own rights as a private property owner to views and fresh air. The paper also alleged that the court battles “forced the city to create, enlarge and maintain” Grant Park. In fact, the court decisions only limited how the park could be used, or more accurately, how the structures in it might be built.

​

Ostensibly a city hero, Ward had no civic something-or-other named for 80 years after he died. This omission is often attributed to his having annoyed City Hall while he was alive. It is more likely that millionaire do-gooders constitute such a small constituency that no alderman felt obliged to cater to it by erecting a memorial. That long neglect was rectified in any event in 1993 when a seven-acre section of Grant Park along Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe Streets, opposite his erstwhile offices, was officially renamed the Aaron Montgomery Ward Gardens.

​

Chicago’s newest major park is both old and new. Millennium Park’s formal arrangement recalls the Beaux Arts style of Grant Park, of which it is in fact an extension, but instead of solemn statesmen and horsemen in bronze it displays contemporary artworks. Whatever its merits as a park, it got Chicagoans buzzing about parks again for the first time in a long time. Crowds were huge, the press glowing.

​

Unfortunately, Millennium Park cost something like a half-billion dollars to build. Not only were the cost overruns  staggering, the revenue to sustain it is probably insufficient. It was paid for largely by donations from corporations whose names adorn its various facilities, an extension of a policy that familiar in museums and university campuses. The donations earned the corporate sponsors the right to occasionally lease whole sections of it for private events; to that extent Millennium is not a truly public park at all.

​

Burnham Park was added to the lakefront in bits and pieces. The northernmost end, abutting Grant Park at Roosevelt Road, was created before World War I, when the Illinois Central Railroad surrendered access to a bit more of its once capacious lakefront rail yards; the area was filled in, and as has been noted, the Field Museum, forbade by law from being built in Grant, Park was put there instead. Beginning in the 1920s, filling in of the lakeshore between that point south toward Jackson Park began. Over time the IC’s abandoned 10-track main line was replaced by a linear park that is little more than a landscaped Lake Shore Drive between 23rd and 57th.

​

If Grant Park is the city’s most admired park, Lincoln Park is the best loved. As we have seen, the site of the future park had been the city’s main burial ground since 1843, which stretched from North Avenue to around Wisconsin Street and from Clark Street (then called Green Bay Road) east to the lake. Its life as a park for the living did not begin until 1860, when the city created Lake Park by setting aside 60 as-yet-unused acres between Wisconsin Street and Webster Avenue from the graveyard that had just been closed for public health reasons.

​

Not all the remains in the old graveyard were removed. Pamela Bannos, the Northwestern University senior lecturer in art who has made the most in-depth study of the old graveyard, estimates that it once held the remains of more than 35,000 people, and that as many as 12,000 bodies may still be there. Builders working in the area often encounter old bones; that happened in 1998, for example, when excavation began for a parking garage at LaSalle and Clark Streets. One family mausoleum, the Couch Tomb, was never removed, and it remains a reminder of Lincoln Park’s early history.

​

When Sara Jane Clarke Lippincott saw the site of the future park in the late 1860s, she found it “a dreary waste of drifting sand and unsightly weeds.” (Tastes change; the design of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, which opened in 1999 at 2430 N. Cannon Drive, tried to  evoke the sand dunes of the site's pre-park past.) However, the tract had comely views and quickly became popular, in part because it was conveniently near neighborhoods of Germans, whose traditions included weekly park-going. “It is an off summer's day,” observed Lippincott, “when some German society does not hold a picnic there.”

​

Swain Nelson, a Swede, drew up the first plan for the park in 1865. It was largely Nelson who oversaw the construction of lagoons and the layout of paths and carriage ways and the plantings on the section between North and Diversey that gave it a character it largely retains to this day. (The Waterfowl Lagoon in the Zoo is the principal surviving feature of the Nelson plan.) His colleague and successor, Olaf Benson made later changes based on that template.

​

George Ade, writing in the 1890s, recalls the lagoon-rich park of that day.

​

On the shores of these lakes, which are linked by quiet waters lying under stone arches, the young man who drives the delivery wagon sits of an evening and holds the hand of the young woman who addresses letters. They are very happy, as well they may be, for no Chicago millionaire has such a magnificent front yard, with such a large lake and so many stately trees around it.

​

Often praised for its “natural” beauty, Lincoln Park is in fact a creation of the engineer, the landscape architect, and the gardener. For example, it was built in no small part out of municipal trash. If visitors to Lincoln Park from Du Page County feel strangely at home there, it may be because in 1907 the Lincoln Park Commission bought more than 100 acres of land near Darien in what is now the Waterfall Glen Forest Preserve and from it mined the topsoil that was used to build up the city park.

​

Later additions (built mainly to accommodate the expansion of Lake Shore Drive) did not, for once, deface the original; Carl Condit called the remodeled stretch from North to Belmont that was developed in the 1930s a project that Burnham would have been proud of. “Seldom,” he wrote, “have urban technology and civic art been combined to better recrea­tional and aesthetic ends.”

​

The six-mile-long Lincoln Park probably should be called Lincoln parks, as it evolved piece by piece over the course of a century as new land was added to it. In 1903 Ossian C. Simonds, the next great landscape designer to be trusted with the park, proposed extend­ing it all the way to Devon Avenue, a mile past its present terminus, but during his tenure it could be extended only as far as Addison. In 1934 it was extended north to Foster Avenue. A further expansion from Foster to Hollywood Avenue on a series of fills done during the 1950s brought the park’s total acreage to 1,200 acres.

​

Long-time mayor Richard M. Daley long talked of extending Lake Shore Drive to the city line at Howard Street on new lake fill that would be, in effect, an extension of Lincoln Park. The financial and political obstacles to the plan are considerable; if northward progress is made at the same average pace as in the past, Lincoln Park should reach the city border at Evanston in about 50 years.

​

Soon after the establishment of the South Parks commission in 1869, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux were hired to develop designs for the tracts that were collectively known as the South Park. The west branch of that park is now known as Washington Park, where the old refectory (now known as the Pool and Locker Building) at Pool and Russell Drives was restored in 1992. The South Park Commission’s original Administration Building, built in 1910 to a design by D. H. Burnham & Co., survives, largely intact, as the DuSable Museum of African American History

​

Olmsted’s original and extravagant version of the South Park was never built—the Great Fire put a stop to it. While Washington Park was substantially built in the late 1880s, most of its eastern segment,which became Jackson Park, as still marsh. When Olmsted was asked to help select a site for the World Columbian Exposition that Chicago was to host in 1892, he saw a chance to finish the park and suggested the site as the venue. A new version of the park was drawn up to accommodate the fair’s peculiar needs. The only part of that Jackson Park which remains is the Wooded Island that sits in the Lagoon. Here were built the Ho-o-den, a group of three Japanese pavilions built for the fair. (The pavilions were destroyed by fire in the 1940s, and they were replaced by a Japanese-style stroll garden built on the north end of the Wooded Island.)

​

After the fair closed, Jackson Park was designed again, this time in 1895 by Olmsted’s sons. They took into account the changes to the landscape made for the fair by, for example, installing a reflecting pool meant to recall the fair’s Court of Honor. The park one sees today is essentially the one that was laid out in 1895.

​

City park renaissance

​

The Great Depression triggered an institutional rebirth of the parks movement in Chicago. The mass annexation of 1889 brought 120 square miles of adjoining territory into the City of Chicago, none of which territory was served by the existing three parks commissions. To serve it, another 19 park districts were eventually created. The fragmented nature of the system left most of these districts tottering on narrow tax bases, and many were not fiscally robust enough to survive the Depression. In 1934, the 22 independent parks agencies were consolidated into the Chicago Park District.

​

The mammoth new district was born under a promising sign, politically. The city was then being run by Democrats whom the Democratic President owed big-time, and from 1935 to World War II public works money from the WPA and other federal programs fueled a massive spending on new facilities from field houses and landfills to artworks. Among the many projects that date from this era are the Lake Shore Drive bridge across the Chicago River and the southern reach of Burnham Park, whose development as a lakefront link between Grant and Jackson parks had been stalled by shortages of local funding.

​

That flowering did not last long. After World War II, the parks were no longer seen as the salvation of the city, least of all by the people who ran them. For them, parks were merely one more source of jobs for the politicians. The result was what Carl Condit called official vandalism. The landscapes were not maintained, reform ideals were abandoned, the facilities, save for those used for the newly-popular competitive sports, were neglected. Chicago's park district, once among the best in the nation, became complacent and corrupt.

​

Forrest Claypool, the first of a succession of reformist parks superintendents named by Richard M. Daley, conceded in a 1996 speech that by the 1990s, the CPD had become dysfunctional. Newspaper investigations had found that the Park District was running “ghost towns,” facilities with full schedules of programs and hardly anyone using them—one symptom of a system that being run for the employees rather than for the public.

​

Among the graver offenses charged by critics in the 1960s and ‘70s was the willingness with which city authorities handed over lakefront land meant for parks for other public, but distinctly not recreational uses. A classic case was the decisions to build the McCormick Place convention center (“the Mistake by the Lake”) in Burnham Park. Condit noted the irony that the structure was placed in the park named to honor Daniel Burnham, a location that “represented a barbarous denial of everything that Burnham stood for as a planner.”

​

The more frequent crime against Chicago’s own parks heritage was stealing lakefront land for roads. In 1964 the Department of Public Works and the Park Dis­trict announced a plan to widen and straighten South Lake Shore Drive from 47th Street to 67th Street, which would have required feeling some two thousand trees. It was met with deserved outrage. When construction crews started cutting down trees to make way for a major roadway extension through Jackson Park, South Siders chained themselves to trees. Construction of buildings along the lakefront drew growing public outcry. As a result of these criticisms, the city (under considerable political duress) adopted the Lake Michigan and Chicago Lakefront Protection Ordinance in 1973.

​

That ordinance was but one manifestation of the new era of parks activism that began in the early 1970s. The good-government Friends of the Parks was formed in 1975, whose agenda targeted squandered tax dollars, dilapidated facilities, and incompetent or indifferent staff; worse, those neighborhoods that had once been the recipient of the best that Chicago parks providers could offer, the inner city, were routinely slighted. 

​

The seeds of a renaissance thus were put into the ground, but they did not sprout until the election in 1989 of Richard M. Daley as mayor. Previously, the color green was associated with the Irishness of Chicago mayors, but the younger Daley brought a personal commitment to softening the city’s harshness with trees and flowers. His administration undertook an ambitious program that has seen the replanting of long-neglected park landscapes, the creation of several new natural areas on park lands, and the rehabilitation of historic park buildings, as well as building new ones. Not perhaps since the days of Carter Harrison has Chicago had a mayor so committed to parks. The National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2000 awarded Daley its Trustees' Award for Outstanding Achievement in Public Policy, in part for his commitment to restoring historic parks.

​

Typical was the restoration of the Garfield Park Conservatory. Jens Jensen conceived the conservatory as a series of naturalistic landscapes under glass, a revolutionary idea when it opened in 1908, as dramatic a departure from the Victorian hothouse as the Chicago School skyscraper was from the typical business building.  The dome encloses approximately 4.5 acres; at the time of building in 1905, it was touted as the largest publicly-owned conservatory under one roof in the world.

Jensen explained that the structure’s form was inspired by “the great haystacks which are so eloquent of the richness of prairie soil” and rock outcroppings  along Illinois’s Rock River. His reliance on Illinois’s indigenous landscapes for models was comprehensive; some of the conservatory gardens were meant to emulate poetically the tropical appearance of the Chicago region during prehistoric times.

​

Annual attendance at the Conservatory peaked at half a million visitors in the 1920s. Attendance declined as the average income of the neighborhood dropped and fear of crime rose. The Chicago Park District skimped on maintenance on what had become a minor attraction, and the changes it did make over the years were insensitive to the structure’s original character.

In the 1990s, the CPD began to rectify that neglect. Nearly $10 million in improvements were made to the building, its collections, and its grounds and a Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance formed to manage educational programs and visitor services. (The Conservatory, like Garfield Park itself, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.) A new el stop was opened in 2001 to serve traffic to the grounds (although visitors to the park at first were still advised to tour only during the day and in groups) and the Conservatory has become one of Chicago’s most popular attrac­tions once again.

​

The Conservatory even regained some of its long-lost symbolic significance. In 2002 Mayor Daley nominated the area including the park as part of his Green Town, "the intellectual and physical center of Chicago's greening initiatives," according to one city brochure.

​

The Chicago Park District also began to renovate itself institutionally. Budgets bloated by over-staffing were cured by paring away programs no one needed, contracting out management of parks services, including Soldier Field and the Lincoln Park Zoo, slashing payrolls, and reorganizing decision-making to put power in the hands of neighborhood managers. Importantly from an historic point of view, the CPD realized that what the city needed was not to reinvent the urban park but simply to rebuild the good ones it already had. It set about restoring some of its treasures from the golden age and set about making the promise of parks real for new generations of Chicagoans.