The Lakefront: A Plan That Half-Worked

Chicago's continuous public lakefront was promised by an 1836 commissioners' map. There is a sentence on a fragment of that map, drawn by the canal commissioners of the State of Illinois, that has organized the city's relationship to its lakefront for nearly two hundred years. The fragment shows the strip of lakeshore east of Michigan Avenue. The label on the strip reads: "Public Ground, A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of Any Buildings, or Other Obstruction Whatever."

The phrase "forever open, clear and free" is almost always attributed in Chicago tourist literature to Daniel Burnham. It is not Burnham's. It is sixty-three years older than Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago. Burnham inherited the promise. Burnham drew the lakefront the plan envisioned. But the promise was already older than the city. By the time Burnham's plan was published, the promise had been tested in court and almost lost three times.

This is the lakefront story that gets told too rarely. The lakefront is not one man's vision. It is a 1836 commissioners' wording, a series of lawsuits brought by an unlikely litigant between 1890 and 1911, a 1909 plan that included the lakefront among many other proposals, and a century of half-construction, compromise, and partial restoration. Walking from Millennium Park south to Northerly Island, the walker can read what was built, what was rejected, and what was compromised, sentence by sentence, on the ground.

The defender

Aaron Montgomery Ward is buried at Rosehill Cemetery on the North Side. He founded what was, in 1872, the first general-merchandise mail-order firm in the world. By the 1890s his Chicago headquarters at the corner of Michigan and Madison overlooked Grant Park directly. The view was load-bearing for his business. The view was also, in his mind, load-bearing for the city.

Beginning in 1890, when the City of Chicago proposed to allow various commercial structures in Grant Park, Ward sued. The argument was the 1836 wording: the park had been dedicated as forever open and could not legally hold buildings. The city argued that the wording was advisory and that the public good would be served by allowing commercial use. Ward won the first case. The city kept trying. Ward sued again. Ward won the second case. The city kept trying. Ward sued again. By 1909, the fourth case (Ward v. Field Museum, 241 Ill. 496) reached the Illinois Supreme Court. In October 1909, the same year Burnham and Bennett published the Plan of Chicago, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled for Ward. The Field Museum, then sited on the Grant Park lakefront, would have to move. It moved south to the made land at the river's mouth. Grant Park stayed clear.

The lawsuits cost Ward money and friends. Chicago newspapers attacked him as obstinate, anti-progress, indifferent to the city's interests. The architectural historian Lois Wille, in her 1972 book Forever Open, Clear and Free, made the case that Ward's stubbornness is the single reason the lakefront looks the way it does. The legal scholars Joseph Kearney and Thomas Merrill have published extensively on the Ward cases as a foundational example of the public-trust doctrine in American property law. Without Ward, Wille argues and Kearney and Merrill confirm, Grant Park would today hold museums, parking structures, an armory, and possibly a stadium. With Ward, it holds Buckingham Fountain, a flat expanse of lawn, and an unobstructed view of the lake.

Ward died in 1913, four years after his Supreme Court victory.

The Plan and what got built

Burnham and Bennett's Plan of Chicago, published in July 1909, was the most ambitious civic plan ever produced for an American city. It proposed a continuous public lakefront from Lincoln Park on the north to Jackson Park on the south, a chain of five offshore islands creating a series of sheltered harbors, a diagonal boulevard system overlaid on the existing grid, a centralized civic plaza, museums in Grant Park, a forest preserve ring at the metropolitan edge, a double-deck Wacker Drive along the river, and the Michigan Avenue Bridge that would later create the Magnificent Mile.

About half of what the Plan drew was built. The lakefront parks were. Wacker Drive was. The Michigan Avenue Bridge was. The forest preserves were. The chain of five offshore islands was not; only one was built, the southernmost, called Northerly Island. The diagonal boulevard system was not. The centralized civic plaza was not. The museums went up, but in compromised locations: the Field Museum south of Grant Park rather than in it, the Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium grouped with the Field on what came to be called Museum Campus.

Daniel Burnham died on June 1, 1912, three years after the Plan was published. He saw almost none of it built. Edward Bennett continued the work for another forty-two years. The 1927 dedication of Buckingham Fountain, designed by Bennett on the centerline of Grant Park, was the one fully built Beaux-Arts monument the Plan included. Kate Sturges Buckingham funded the fountain in memory of her brother Clarence. The French sculptor Marcel Loyau won the Prix National in Paris for the seahorse sculptures around the base. John Philip Sousa conducted the dedication concert in August 1927.

The half-built and the half-rejected

Northerly Island, the one island of the five that got built, was for thirty-five years not a park. It was Meigs Field, a single-runway airport that opened in 1948 and grew to become, by 1955, the busiest single-runway airport in the United States. In March 2003 Mayor Richard M. Daley, citing security concerns after the September 11, 2001 attacks, ordered the airport's runway destroyed overnight by bulldozers without notice to the Federal Aviation Administration or the airport's operators. The FAA later imposed the maximum allowed fine of $33,000. The runway became a park. Whether the action was a final restoration of the Plan's vision (Daley's framing) or an executive bypass of legitimate aviation process (the FAA's framing) is still debated. The fact on the ground is that Northerly Island is, since 2015, a public peninsula with a small concert venue and an open-air walking path. The four other islands the Plan drew were never built.

Soldier Field, completed in 1924 as Grant Park Stadium and renamed Soldier Field on November 11, 1925 to honor veterans of the First World War, was a Beaux-Arts colonnade stadium consistent with the Plan's classical vocabulary. In 2003 the stadium was demolished from the inside and replaced by a steel-and-glass seating bowl that rose above the original colonnade, while preserving the colonnade itself as a kind of frame. The New York Times listed the rebuilt stadium as one of the five best new buildings of 2003. The architectural critic Blair Kamin, writing in the Chicago Tribune, called it "the eyesore on the lake shore." The National Park Service stripped Soldier Field's National Historic Landmark designation in 2006 because the renovation had compromised the historic exterior. Both judgments are defensible. The stadium is the most visible piece of compromise on the lakefront.

The Museum Campus trio (Field Museum, Shedd Aquarium, Adler Planetarium) is the Plan's classical-architecture cluster that did get built, with the museums grouped south of Soldier Field on filled land. The Field Museum's building, by Peirce Anderson of Graham, Anderson, Probst and White, opened May 2, 1921. The Shedd Aquarium, finished in 1930, was for decades the largest indoor aquarium in the United States. The Adler Planetarium, finished in 1930 by Ernest A. Grunsfeld, was the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere. The architectural unity is real. The location is not where Burnham drew it.

Millennium Park and the deferred completion

The northwest corner of Grant Park was, until 2004, a parking garage and rail yard. The Plan had drawn the corner as part of the continuous park. The rail yard had been there since the 1850s, predating the Plan. For a hundred and forty years the rail yard occupied land the Plan said should be park.

The Millennium Park project, begun in 1997 and opened in July 2004, finally covered the rail yard with a deck and built the park on top. The project ran $325 million over its original $150 million budget. The final cost was about $475 million. The park holds Frank Gehry's Jay Pritzker Pavilion (acceptance of the commission 1999), Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate (2006), Jaume Plensa's Crown Fountain (2004), and a Lurie Garden by Kathryn Gustafson and Piet Oudolf. Timothy Gilfoyle's institutional history of the park, published in 2006, names it the most successful piece of public-space construction in Chicago since the original Plan. It is also, the institutional history notes, ninety-five years late.

What the walk teaches

The lakefront from Lincoln Park to Jackson Park is about twenty-four miles of accessible public shoreline, the longest in any major American city. Most of it traces back to the 1836 commissioners' wording, defended by Ward through the courts, drawn by Burnham, and built across a century in fragments. The walk from Millennium Park to Northerly Island takes about ninety minutes at a moderate pace. The 146 bus parallels the route for any walker who needs a bailout. The Roosevelt Red Line stop offers an early exit at Soldier Field.

What the walk teaches is the difference between a plan, a defense, and a fact. The Plan is the drawing. The defense is the work that has to be done to keep the drawing from being undone. The fact is what is on the ground. Chicago's lakefront has all three in different proportions at different points along its length. Buckingham Fountain is the Plan executed. The colonnade of Soldier Field is a defense partially lost. Millennium Park is a Plan finally honored, ninety-five years late, with significant amendments by Gehry and Kapoor and Plensa that Burnham would not have recognized.

The 1836 commissioners did not draw any of this. They wrote four words. Forever open, clear, free. Two hundred years of Chicago history, including Ward's lawsuits, Burnham's drawings, Bennett's fountain, Wille's book, Daley's bulldozers, and Kapoor's mirrored sculpture, are the consequence of those four words. Walking the lakefront is walking inside their defense.