Lincoln Park - 1870's

Copyright 2005 David R. Phillps

Lincoln Park is a 1,200 acre (4.9 km˛, 1.875 mi˛) park along Chicago, Illinois' lakefront facing Lake Michigan.

The park stretches from North Avenue (1600 N) on the south to Foster (5200 N), just north of the Lake Shore Drive terminus at North Hollywood Avenue. It is Chicago's largest public park. Its recreational facilities include 15 baseball areas, 6 basketball courts, 2 softball courts, 35 tennis courts, 163 volley ball courts, field houses, and a golf course. It includes a number of harbours with boating facilities, as well as public beaches. There are landscaped gardens, a zoo, the Lincoln Park Conservatory, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and a theater on the lake with regular outdoor performances during the summer.

Zoo

Lincoln Park is well known for the Lincoln Park Zoo, a free zoo that is open year-round. Two sections of Lincoln Park Zoo have been set aside for children. The partially-indoor Pritzker Family Children's Zoo includes habitats of various North American wildlife, and the Farm-in-the-Zoo Presented by John Deere is a working reproduction of a Midwestern farm containing horses and livestock such as pigs, cows, and sheep. At the Farm-in-the-Zoo, children can feed and interact with the animals and view live demonstrations of farm work such as the milking of cows.

Art

A statue of Shakespeare decorated for winter.

Friedrich Schiller statue near the Lincoln Park Conservatory.

Photochrom of the Grant Memorial ca. 1901 Lincoln Park is known for its statuary. Walking through the zoo and into the park, one sees many of Chicago's great works of art. Just as there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Grant Park, there is a memorial to Ulysses S. Grant in Lincoln Park overlooking Cannon Drive at the south end of the zoo. The sculpture was created in 1891 by Louis Rebisso. There is also a statue of Lincoln in Lincoln Park, the Standing Lincoln (1887), by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the same sculptor who created the Sitting Lincoln in Grant Park. A standing Lincoln can be seen behind the Chicago History Museum. The only other person who is immortalized by statues in both Grant and Lincoln Parks is Alexander Hamilton, the Lincoln Park statue sculpted by John Angel. John Gelert's Hans Christian Andersen (1896) on Stockton Drive provides a tribute to the Danish storyteller. The Eugene Field Memorial (1922) designed by Edward McCartan remembers the Chicago Daily News columnist and poet who wrote "Little Boy Blue" and "Winken, Blinken, and Nod." William Ordway Partridge's statue of William Shakespeare (1894) provides a third great story-teller in Lincoln Park. This seated Shakespeare provides a lap for children to climb onto. A bust of Sir Georg Solti, the former conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was also situated just west of the zoo until its relocation to Grant Park in October, 2006. Statues of the German poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller can also be found in Lincoln park. The large Goethe statue is located near Diversey and Stockton. The smaller Schiller statue is located near the western entrance to the zoo. At Addison Street stands a 40-foot (12 m) totem pole depicting Kwanusila the Thunderbird. Finally, a statue of John Peter Altgeld (1915), the nineteenth-century Illinois Governor who pardoned the Haymarket Square rioters, can be seen just south of Diversey. This statue was created by Gutzon Borglum and unveiled on September 6, 1915. Borglum went on to become the sculptor of the Mount Rushmore Monument.

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