Promptly at 8 p.m. Sunday, three powerful electric motors deep in the bowels of a bunkerlike control room off the darkened Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park will roar to life.
Almost invisible in the gloaming of an end-of-April evening, long-dormant jets of water in the world’s biggest fountain will rise and soar in their first public display since last July. From the top bowl of the three-tiered, 68-year-old structure, a majestic, pulsing plume of water will shoot 165 feet into the air.
Then, to herald that the venerable fountain officially is back in service after a 9-month rehabilitation project, piercing white lights will snap on. At first only the towering plume will be illuminated against the night sky.
As the night progresses, however, rich-colored lights-amber, blue and red-will seep down over the sculpted marble surfaces of the beaux-arts fountain. It will look as though the steady hand of some titanic, unseen artist is drizzling new colors over an elaborate old vase.
The display Sunday night will be unlike any ever seen before at Buckingham Fountain, a whole new show for the first time fully integrating changing movement of water with changing lights. And, with revitalized pumps and valves, the fountain squirts and spumes like new, glowing more brightly than it has in 50 years under more powerful lighting.
Sunday’s rededication will be a low-key affair. Edward Bennett III, a Chicago executive, and grandson and namesake of the fountain’s architect, will be there. The Chicago All-City Children’s Choir will perform and Chicago Park District and Art Institute officials will speak.
The ceremony won’t be as grand as the one on Aug. 26, 1927, when the fountain originally was dedicated. On hand then was Kate Buckingham, the shy but generous benefactor who provided $700,000 to build it in memory of her brother, Clarence. So were Bennett’s grandfather and tens of thousands of Chicagoans.
The opening of the fountain was an event of enormous civic pride. The city brought in John Philip Sousa and his marching band to play “Stars and Stripes Forever” when the fountain’s jets and lights first were turned on.
Even without Sousa tunes, the fountain should provide a pretty spectacular show Sunday.
“We tried to document what the original light and water show was like when the fountain was built and first turned on in 1927,” said Joe Hoerner, the Park District’s preservation architect. “We wanted to replicate the show historically, but there was no way to know what was in the original show.”
Instead, Hoerner brought in John Culbert, an award-winning theater lighting designer and DePaul University professor who donated his talents to choreograph a new light and water show for the fountain.
“I wanted to create something elegant, not a rock ‘n’ roll laser light show,” Culbert said. “We looked at the rhythm of how the light and water changes and created a storyboard series of sketches of routines the fountain could follow.
“The `looks’ we developed took advantage of new lights and the new valves and spouts. That allowed us to create many different compositions I feel are quite clean and crisp in their look.”
The hourlong pattern of routines has been committed to computers, which will run the displays from 10 a.m. to 11 p.m. throughout the summer season.
During the day, the “major” display, when the pumps are pushing 13,000 gallons a minute, spouting the 165-foot central water column, will begin every hour on the hour, lasting for 20 minutes.
It will segue into two 20-minute “minor” displays, pumping 5,000 gallons a minute.
At dusk, when the lights first go on, the water patterns will be illuminated with a “static” display of primarily white and amber lights.
At 9 p.m., however, the dramatic, continuously changing show of colors begins, continuing until 11 p.m.
“The new routines changes the `looks’ much more frequently,” Culbert said. “It probably is most spectacular from 10:45 p.m. to 11 p.m., as the system shuts down for the night because more things are turning on and off quicker than at any other time during the day.”
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After $2.8 million of work, physically the fountain looks the same as it did before it was torn down last July. But its massive concrete core is essentially a new structure. The sculpted pink Georgia marble “skin” is the original, mended where it had cracked or broken during 66 hard winters and repinned to the new core.
The new piping and valves replace old, sclerotic arteries in the structure, dramatically enhancing the water show. The major water column leaps 25 feet higher than it did last summer.
Minor geysers coming from “console” stones on the perimeter of the two lower bowls, reduced to burbles barely 2 inches high in recent decades, now spout 3 feet into the air. Major spouts, coming from the magnificent bronze sea horse sculptures and from isolated jets in the middle of the 280-foot-wide basin, rise again in perfect arcs after being flattened by clogged plumbing for 30 years.
The lighting was goosed up with more powerful lamps, and more of them, to 796 from 653 last year.
Culbert’s work probably would have most fascinated Kate Buckingham. In her late 60s during the fountain’s construction, she showed up nightly at the work site and got on hands and knees to experiment with various lenses and colors in the lighting system.
When she died in 1937, she was the last of the Buckinghams, who made their fortune in the grain business while Chicago grew from a village to a city.
She left an endowment so that the fountain would be maintained and operated in perpetuity at no taxpayer expense, even providing the $2.8 million for the current rebuilding. The fund is administered by the Art Institute, another Chicago institution she supported generously.
THE MAKINGS OF A MONUMENT
Dedication
Buckingham Fountain was commissioned by Kate Buckingham, in memory of her brother, Clarence, for $700,000. It opened May 26, 1927.
Design
Edward H. Bennett designed the fountain to represent Lake Michigan with four sea horses, built by Marcel Loyau, to symbolize the four states that touch the lake: Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana and Michigan. Bennett attributed the design specifically to the influence of the Fountain of Latona at Versailles.
Construction
The fountain was constructed (using more than 4,000 barrels of concrete) of reinforced concrete supported on wood and concrete piles.
Power
The water displays are powered by three pumps:
– Pump one: 75 horsepower for 1,500 gallons of water a minute.
– Pump two: 190 horsepower for 5,500 gallons of water a minute.
– Pump three: 250 horsepower for 7,000 gallons of water per minute.
Water pressure
The pressure used to create the cascading fountains and central jet more than doubled to 125 pounds per square inch.
Jets
The fountain has 134 water jets in the following configurations:
– 38 jets point upwards from the top basin, including a central jet to produce a 165-foot geyser.
– 32 jets at the consoles.
– 36 jets point to one of the three basins.
– 20 jets shoot up from the four cattail clusters.
– 8 jets spout from the sea horses’ mouths.
Lights
The fountain has 796 lights in the following configurations:
– 132 projectors to light the jets.
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– 664 smaller lights that rest in the troughs of each basin.
Operations
An endowment fund set up by Kate Buckingham covers all operating and repair costs, administered by the Art Institute of Chicago.
Source: Harry Weese Associates.