Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago's Lakefront


Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront. By Lois Wille. 185 pages.

Public Ground - A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free of any Buildings, or Other Obstruction whatever.

With these words, the founders of Chicago declared that the most valuable land of the city, its shoreline, would be reserved for the people. Of the thirty miles of Lake Michigan shoreline within Chicago, twenty-four miles are parkland. Where other cities crowded their waterfronts with factories and warehouses, blotting out any memory that they sit on a body of water, Chicago sought to keep it clear of commerce and industry. The result is a lakefront park that is the envy of the world. This is the story of Chicago’s heritage, how the city nearly squandered it, and how citizens fought to preserve it. 

A Park, If You Can Keep It

Two decisions taken in the early days would save the Lake Michigan waterfront. One involved the sale of the now-defunct Fort Dearborn. The leaders of Chicago, all wealthy land speculators, resolved to convert 20 acres of the land into a public square. The idea of the historic site being coated with factories and granaries upset them. Dearborn Park would become a popular site for political rallies and would eventually become the founding site of the Chicago Public Library.

The second decision was made by the men named by the state to manage construction of the canal: they resolved not to sell the land between Michigan Avenue and the lake. Even though the land frequently flooded, it probably would have brought top dollar from the grain and meatpacking concerns. Instead, they gifted it to the people of Chicago. Out of that narrow strip of land would bloom the great waterfront park that exists today.

To keep the promise of vacant lakeshore, city leaders established Lake Park in 1844. However, the city invested little in it, and it became a dumping ground for the city’s waste. Ignoring the entreaty to keep the lakeshore “Forever, Open, Clear, and Free,” city leaders sold most of the southern shoreline to the Illinois Central Railroad. In 1869, the Illinois Central went further and bribed the state legislature to let them build a train depot on Lake Park in exchange for establishing a park fund for Chicago. Lake Park would not be given back to the people until 1892.

The city’s front yard might forever be the property of the Illinois Central. But the city now had $800,000 ($30.2 million in 2024 dollars) to build a park, and everyone agreed the city needed breathing space. The city looked to the North Side to build a new park. In contrast to the South and West Sides, the North Side was undeveloped. The city’s main cemetery was located there and was close to bursting. The North Siders, concerned about disease from the cemetery, lobbied to have the cemetery emptied and replaced with a park. Forgetting that there was already a Lake Park, the City Council established another Lake Park on the North Side in October 1864.

A few months later, President Lincoln was assassinated. In honor of Illinois’ first citizen, the park was renamed Lincoln Park. The task of moving the 20,000 bodies buried in the cemetery was never completed – bodies are still being found in the park to this day.

Urbs in Horto

While a good start, Lincoln Park was too far away for the majority of citizens on the South and West Sides to enjoy. Paul Cornell, a rich lawyer in Hyde Park (not part of the city in those days), began campaigning for parks there. He knew that the city would eventually expand there and should build a park while the land was cheap. He proposed an independent park commission to run the parks in the southern outskirts of the city and suburbs. Cornell went to the legislature to set up the system, which said the city council should set up parks if they wanted to run them. After greasing some palms, Cornell got his bill—on the condition that it pass in a referendum. He was defeated in a vote widely decried as fraudulent.

But Cornell didn’t give up. This time, he thought bigger: he proposed a city circled by parks with grand boulevards linking them. Under this system, all citizens of Chicago would be 30 minutes away from a park. In 1869, the legislature passed a bill providing for three parks commissions, one for each side of the city. At least on the South and West Sides, the referendums passed this time. The North Siders already had their park and were loath to pay taxes for other people’s parks. The county court set up a North Side Park Commission anyways. 

Political squabbling immediately plagued the new park system. Each side of the city complained they were paying too much and their neighbors too little. Real estate developers and politicians party to the deals insisted on selling land at grossly inflated prices, infuriating property owners and politicians not in on the scheme. The park’s advocates estimated acquiring the park land would cost $75,000. Thanks to the efforts of speculators, it ended up costing $3.5 million.

But despite the fighting and scandals, the city had a parks system at last. Residents were captivated by the new look, and the parks unleashed a wave of public-spiritedness not seen before in a city defined by hustling. Nobody could foresee the future disaster awaiting them.

On October 8, 1871, the Great Chicago Fire erupted, killing 300 people, destroying 17,500 buildings, and leaving a third of the city homeless. It seemed that Chicago’s ambitions were forever ruined. But three days later, Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune ran an editorial, crying, Chicago Shall Rise Again. The citizens responded by electing Medill mayor a month later. This time, Chicagoans were determined to build a beautiful city from the ashes.

Park commissioners were told to go ahead with their plans, even if the records had burned and had to be pieced together from memory. Attracted to the chance to build a new city from scratch, a new generation of architects moved to Chicago. Over the next two decades, Chicago’s parks would become the finest in the world. 2,000 acres were converted to 8 big parks and 29 small ones, with 35 miles of boulevards linking them.

Even before they were finished, the parks drew all kinds of citizens. The boulevards drew daredevils who liked to race their horses, frightening slower traffic. The commissioners later restricted racing horses to a few hours on Wednesdays and Fridays. On these days, free concerts were hosted in the park, playing Strauss and Beethoven. In the mornings, sheep grazed on the grass to keep it short. Baseball, tennis, boating, swimming, ice skating - the parks provided it to the people. Bicycling was the newest craze, but the the parks commissions banned the “outlandish machines” from the parks grounds. Carriage-riders screamed with rage as they swarmed down the boulevards. With a gift of two pairs of swans, the Lincoln Park Zoo was opened, one of the few zoos in the world with free entry.

Montgomery Ward

While Chicago had been building other beautiful parks in the two decades after the fire, downtown Lake Park was still shabby. Stables, garbage, and railroad sheds littered what was supposed to be Chicago’s centerpiece park. All of this enraged Montgomery Ward, founder of the nation’s first mail-order catalog business. He called his friend and attorney, George P. Merrick, and told him to do something about it. His battle for the park would cost him $50,000, or $1.75 million in today’s money.

The water past the Illinois Central Railroad had gradually been filled with debris from the fire. As a result, Lake Park now covered so much area that Mayor DeWitt Cregier announced plans to build a new civic center on that land. While this violated the injunction that the lakefront remain vacant, he argued that since the use was public and not on the original land protected by Chicago’s founders, it was acceptable. However, he had misunderstood Montgomery Ward. He didn’t want any buildings constructed on Lake Park and filed a lawsuit blocking the construction. The Illinois Supreme Court agreed with him. Two buildings were left behind: the Chicago Public Library and the Art Institute of Chicago. The court ruled that since the original abutters had already consented to those buildings’ construction, they could stay.

Baffled by his “open space” concept, city leaders and the newspapers heaped abuse on Ward for his lawsuit. An intensely private man, Ward regretted taking up the cause at all, complaining even gratitude had been denied him. Ward offered to construct the park at his own expense, but the city declined to take him up on his offer. City officials, however, did concede that Lake Park would be a park. Today it is named Grant Park, a centerpiece of downtown Chicago.

Make No Little Plans

Make no little plans, said Daniel Burnham: They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever growing insistency.

As an architect, Daniel Burnham worshipped order and cherished beauty. The Chicago he designed buildings for in the 1890s was neither. True, parks had flourished on each side of the city, and it finally looked like Lake Park downtown would be cleaned up thanks to Montgomery Ward. But between the parks was a mass of slums and skyscrapers, breweries, and slaughterhouses. In 1894, shortly after designing the wildly successful World’s Fair, Burnham started sketching out a plan for Chicago. Finally completed in 1909, Burnham’s Chicago Plan was the first comprehensive plan for any city.

Focusing on the lakefront, Burnham reimagined it as one unbroken playground for the people. Taking advantage of Chicago’s limitless supply of landfill, he imagined man-made lagoons and islands dotting the shore. Burnham then convinced Chicago’s Commercial Club that such a plan would sound business as well. Laborers would recreate in the new parks rather than attend dens of vice or unionize.

The Commercial Club started lobbying in Springfield for condemnation rights to connect all the lakeshore parks together. They succeeded, but the Illinois Central Railroad managed to get its land excluded from the bill, making the measure nearly worthless. Not to be deterred, Burnham and the Commercial Club went on a relentless publicity tour of the Chicago Plan. Newspapers spent weeks displaying the beautiful illustrations, children studied it in school, and every property owner was mailed a simplified version of the plan. The Illinois Central started to realize that the plan was so popular they could no longer count on the state legislature to protect them. Meeting city leaders again, the railroad agreed to swap their shore rights in exchange for land to build a new terminal. They also agreed to electrify their line so that soot from the trains would not pollute Chicago.

Daniel Burnham, sadly, never got to see his plan come to fruition. He died while traveling in Germany in 1912; the city would not pass a new lakefront ordinance until 1919. And while both the Illinois Central and the government made good starts, neither side entirely fulfilled its side of the bargain. The city constructed one island, Northerly, and connected the lakefront, naming the new park and lagoon Burnham Park. The Illinois Central depressed and electrified its tracks but never consolidated its lines at a new station. By the time 1930 rolled around, the city was bankrupt, unable to even finish the landscaping for Burnham Park.

The Age of Cement

After the depression came World War II, and the decisions made by the parks commission after the war were even more disastrous. The strong man on the board was Jacob M. Arvey, and he was determined to use the city’s parks for patronage rather than recreation. Northerly Island became an airport for business executives, costing taxpayers $200,000-$300,000 a year ($2.5m-$3.9m 2024 dollars). Arvey then allowed 120 acres on the north and south shores to be used as sites for water filtration plants. The Chicago Plan Commission protested that the plants should be placed on blighted land, but it would save the city money to use land it already owned. As a compromise, a 10-and-a-half-acre park was constructed on the north shore site, little more than landscaping for the filtration plant. But the worst development would be McCormick Place, a massive convention center on the lakefront. 

The lakefront at 23rd Street was not an obvious place to site the convention center. It was a mile from the nearest public transit stop and even farther from the central business district. The only road with access to it was Lake Shore Drive, further increasing traffic on the parkway. Nor was there a need for a large convention center. A study was conducted, and there were only 48 conventions held each year in the United States that needed more than 25,000 square feet. McCormick Place had 306,000 square feet. Further study concluded that the convention center would run at a loss unless subsidized heavily by a race track tax. People protested, but City Hall, backed by the Chicago Tribune, rushed the necessary approvals through government, and McCormick Place broke ground on September 17, 1958.

From the beginning, the place was cursed. In 1962, two years after it opened, Chicago had fewer conventions than it had in 1955, and it ran at a loss. Only the fortunes of the racing business allowed the bondholders to be repaid. As predicted, conventions clogged up traffic on Lake Shore Drive, requiring that $62m be spent to construct an interchange to reach the hall. At least it hid the ugliness of the hall.1

Then, on January 16, 1967, the convention hall burned down. Mayor Daley organized an investigation into the matter, and the evidence was damning. Not only were there not enough sprinklers to provide fire protection, the steel beams holding up the structure were not protected from fire. Had the taxpayer’s money been squandered on a cheap job? Did fire officials inspect the convention hall? Did they ignore fire code violations under pressure from the mayor? Daley’s Republican opponent, John Waner, suddenly had a campaign issue. But when he brought it up to the Chicago Tribune he was told to shut up about the campaign hall:

He said if I started blasting away at it [McCormick Place] it might embarrass him and the Tribune, so I had to shut up. I said the Tribune wasn’t doing anything for me anyways. So Tagge said yeah, but at least they weren’t hurting me. So I shut up.

Mayor Daley, never one to waste a good crisis, promised a bigger, more beautiful McCormick Place. This time, all the unsightly parking lots would be moved underground, and the structure would be made of glass rather than concrete. While this McCormick Place would expand all the way to the lakefront, parks advocates would get a concession: a small park to connect the north and south sides of the shore.

You Can Have Too Much Green Grass

The parks advocates, seeing the writing on the wall, didn’t fight the new convention center. But they had formed a coalition of protestors that would fight to save Chicago’s park system from further destruction.

And Chicago would need a resistance. In 1965, the city, like most urban centers in America, was in dire straits. Fleeing the decaying and segregated school system, middle-class parents moved to the suburbs. The Chicago Transportation Authority, facing declining revenues, repeatedly raised its fares. All of this contributed to increased traffic and strain on city roads and highways. Mayor Daley, looking to solve the traffic problem, decided to expand Lake Shore Drive through Jackson Park.

Protestors were livid that one of Chicago’s greatest parks would have a highway bisecting it and started chaining themselves to trees to protect them from the chainsaws. Each time, they were arrested, and the road advanced a few feet. It looked like a losing battle, but Daley stopped the road halfway through and announced a new study on improving the park for recreation. The study was not serious -it was given to a firm that routinely accepted business from the city, and they were told the results they would find in advance. Once the protestors were mollified, construction resumed on the other half of the highway. The road remains to this day.

There was no shortage of other bad ideas to protest. The city parks department, weighed down by patronage, actively covered the great parks constructed in the late 19th century in concrete. They imagined highways and parking lots where there should be ponds and grass. When asked why he was tearing up two lawns in Grant Park, Park District President James Gatley said:

“You can have too much green grass.”

Chicago’s parks system had been the envy of the world in 1890, but the system had not grown to accommodate its 3.5 million residents. The city had gone from the first in the nation for park space per 1,000 residents to near-last. Daley would release sketches of proposed parks with great fanfare and then quietly bury them. Indeed, he seemed to think the large parks were outdated, remarking that:

The thinking now is to have more small parks out in the neighborhoods rather than these large parks.

What Daley thought Lake Michigan needed was an “aquaport”, an airport built into the lake itself. Massive dikes would hold back the water. It would cost three to four times the cost of a normal airport, and have to be built six and a half miles into the lake. Lake Shore Drive would have to be expanded again to accommodate the traffic, cutting off citizens further from the lake. Fortunately, even the Illinois Legislature could see the project for the boondoggle it was and denied Daley the funds needed to construct it.

The Future

Chicago’s founders left a sacred trust to its citizens in the form of a lakeshore that all could enjoy. The city has often not lived up to that trust. City leaders have see-sawed between the needs of the parks and the needs of car traffic. In many parts of Chicago, Lake Shore Drive is a permanent barrier to citizens hoping to walk along the shore. A new attitude among city leaders and citizen vigilance will be required to ensure the Lake Michigan shore remains Forever, Open, Clear, and Free.

  1. Interestingly, American Pharaoh describes McCormick Place as a massive success, making Chicago the convention capital of America. ↩

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