Vintage: Millennium Park turns 20

Millennium Park turns 20 years old on July 16. Former Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin called the project, “the best thing former Mayor Richard M. Daley ever did.”

With its glistening Cloud Gate sculpture nicknamed The Bean (by the Indian-born, London-based artist Anish Kapoor) and raucous Crown Fountain (by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa), the oasislike Lurie Garden and festive Pritzker Pavilion (by Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry), the $490 million, 24.5-acre post-industrial playground, “is the face Chicago wants to show the world, a dazzling antidote to the gun violence wracking city neighborhoods,” Kamin wrote in 2014.

The Millennium Park that opened in 2004, four years behind schedule, was a supercharged version of the bland, Beaux-Arts proposal from Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that Daley initially unveiled.

In addition to these eye-popping icons, it had more than 50% more acreage. Without those features, which were backed by $220 million in private donations and inserted into the park after construction was underway, Millennium Park would have none of the magic — and few of the ripple effects Chicago enjoys today.

“But the park is no Potemkin village or gated theme park,” Kamin wrote. “It’s a new town square that draws together, if only fleetingly, the residents of a metropolis separated by the fault lines of race and class. It has changed — and continues to change — significant swaths of the city around it.”

Though the park has been open for just two decades, visionaries throughout the city’s history have considered the lakefront among Chicago’s prime assets.

1830s-1851: An ‘old ditch’ opens Chicago to the world

Much of the area that is now Grant and Millennium parks was part of Lake Michigan in the early 1800s, which means it wasn’t land at all — it was water.

With construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal began July 4, 1836, lakefront property became highly valuable. Upon the canal’s completion in 1848, cargo could travel smoothly from the Gulf of Mexico, up the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, join the Chicago River, head out into the Great Lakes and then over to the Eastern Seaboard. The waterway would make Chicago the epicenter of trade in the Midwest, and speculators bought up parcels then resold them for enormous profit.

Locals, however, believed the area’s lakefront should be preserved for the greater good. This is when they directed their attention to Fort Dearborn.

The military installation, which was located where the Chicago River met Lake Michigan, became the site of a bloody 15-minute battle between the Potawotami and the encampment’s residents on Aug. 15, 1812. But following the Treaty of Chicago in 1833, in which Native Americans ceded their land to the federal government, the land was set to be sold.

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During a weekly town meeting on Nov. 2, 1835, the first of the land that had been Fort Dearborn and would become Grant Park along the lakefront was deeded to the citizens of Chicago “for all time to come for a public square, accessible at all times to the people.” (This resolution was cited in 2012, to declare the arrest of Occupy Chicago demonstrators in October 2011 unconstitutional.)

One year later the state legislature reserved the lakefront east of Michigan Avenue, from Madison Street south to Roosevelt Road, as “public ground — a common to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings or other obstruction whatever.”

1852: Railroad arrives

Sixteen years after three commissioners of the Illinois and Michigan Canal set aside a soggy stretch of lakefront east of Michigan Avenue that was to remain “forever open, clear and free,” the new Illinois Central Railroad derailed that noble declaration.

Illinois Central was originally proposed in 1832 as a line linking Galena in the northwestern corner of the state with Cairo at the state’s southern tip. Since no one was willing to bet on a newfangled technology on what was then the American frontier, the railroad remained a dream until it was rescued by U.S. Sen. Stephen Douglas in 1849, who got a federal land grant for a railroad, the first ever.

The railroad, refused a right of way to downtown Chicago, was granted instead the right to build a causeway along the lakefront from 22nd Street to Randolph Street so its trains could reach the Chicago River. The trestle and its breakwater were unsightly, but protected Michigan Avenue and its mansions from fierce lake storms.

Soon three daily round trips delivered passengers between Chicago and Hyde Park, Lois Wille wrote in “Forever Open, Clear, and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront.”

Over the years, the railroad filled in acreage to the east, creating room for rail yards, river and lake boat transfer stations, train sheds and, finally, piggyback trucking facilities.

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Oct. 8-10, 1871: Great Chicago Fire

Chicago’s great conflagration destroyed everything within a 3-mile swath of the city — including an estimated 17,450 buildings.

Yet the city vowed to rebuild. A young real estate developer named William Kerfoot became the first person to erect a building in the devastated business district. Fueled by municipal, business and humanitarian aid from far and wide, the city bounced back quickly as part of a so-called Great Rebuilding. To make room for the city’s reconstruction, tons of charred debris were carted to Lake Michigan. The lagoon between the lakefront and Illinois Central’s tracks became filled in.

Early 1900s: Protecting Chicago’s ‘front lawn’

As land began to take root further east into the lake, a few dedicated Chicagoans reaffirmed that the purpose of the city’s lakefront was to serve as a “front lawn” for its residents — and not a dumping site.

Mail order magnate Aaron Montgomery Ward went to court several times between 1890 and 1910 to get the shoreline area, then known as Lake Park (now Grant Park), cleared off and preserved as park space — and won each time. He forced the city to create and maintain the now more than 300-acre Grant Park and won legal recognition of citizens’ rights to have a say about the city’s parks.

Daniel Burnham (who is credited with saying “Make no little plans”) unveiled his Plan of Chicago to the public on July 4, 1909. It initially received little attention, but today it’s considered an early triumph in modern urban planning.

Oct. 6, 1977: ‘Garden for arts’ eyed for railroad site

Though Grant Park had hosted concerts since the early 20th century, plans for a permanent music venue had been debated for decades. A band shell inspired by the design of the Hollywood Bowl in California opened just north of the Field Museum in August 1931. Meant to be temporary, the structure provided a home for concerts in the ensuing decades as the Chicago Park District and local organizations argued over design and placement of a new music facility.

A proposal for a site in the northwest corner of the park — occupied by the formerly bustling Illinois Central switching yard, thousands of cars occupying concrete parking lots and warehouses — wasn’t considered until the late 1970s. Prepared by the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council in coordination with advocacy groups Friends of the Parks, the Open Lands Project and the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects, the $10 million plans for Lakefront Gardens for the Performing Arts featured a 10,000 outdoor music bowl within a 20-acre park just east of Michigan Avenue between Randolph and Monroe streets.

The Park District opposed the idea of Lakefront Gardens. The project’s potential price tag ballooned to $50 million with costs to acquire the air rights to the Illinois Central facilities factored in. As the haggling continued, Mayor Michael Bilandic approved plans to build a $1.6 million “demountable” amphitheater in Butler Field. The Petrillo Music Shell (named for hard-nosed musicians union leader James Petrillo) opened in 1978 and remains there today.

1996: Illinois Central sued by city for unused property

Following Burnham’s plan, most of Grant Park was built up in the early 20th century using designs by his partner Edward Bennett. But its northwest corner remained largely undeveloped because the Illinois Central Railroad had been given control of the land in 1852.

After city attorneys filed a lawsuit later in 1996, the Illinois Central returned the land to the city, providing Daley with a rare chance to put his stamp on a historic stretch of downtown real estate. That cleared the way for Millennium Park and other projects, including a $43 million busway between downtown and McCormick Place and an Art Institute of Chicago expansion.

March 30, 1998: Daley unveils plans for Lakefront Millennium Project

The Lakefront Millennium Project plans included an outdoor stage facing a “Great Lawn” able to accommodate up to 30,000 visitors; a 300-seat indoor performance theater behind the stage; an outdoor amphitheater for poetry readings and small performances; a plaza with a reflecting pool that would become a skating rink in the winter; and flower gardens.

The park was to be built atop a new 2,500-space parking garage on a 16.5-acre parcel of former railroad land bordered by Michigan Avenue, Columbus Drive, Randolph and Monroe streets.

Construction was expected to be completed by summer 2000 to welcome the new century.

August 2001: Costs skyrocket

Originally slated to open the previous summer, Millennium Park was in trouble before the first shovel hit the ground and was vastly over budget, records and interviews show as part of a Tribune investigation. Worse still, it appeared the city had exhausted the funds it set aside for the project, and the new scheduled opening date was still two years away, records show.

Many of the park’s problems stemmed from a breakneck schedule that was set because of Daley’s desire to open the park by the summer of 2000. Construction was started before the plans for Millennium Park were complete, causing work to stop hundreds of times while designers scribbled out revisions and forcing crews to redo some construction.

Furthermore, city officials ignored safeguards that may have prevented some of the construction blunders and contract disputes that plagued the project. Those officials allowed major portions of the park to be built without building permits and ignored a state purchasing law in a rush to sign a construction contract, records show.

And to design the park, the city hired an engineering firm that was later retained as part of the team supervising the construction, a relationship that experts called a conflict of interest.

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July 16, 2004: Millennium Park officially opens

The park debuted four years late and over budget. Kamin said the case is fodder for critics who have disingenuously contrasted the park’s $490 million final cost with the $150 million price tag that Daley announced in 1998.

“That’s like saying that a Ferrari should cost the same as a Ford Fiesta,” he wrote in 2014.

April 2006: ‘The Bean’ finally gleams — seemlessly

Almost two years after it was temporarily uncovered at the dedication of Millennium Park, every curve of Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate was finally buffed, polished and its mirror-like surface ready to reflect the city’s structures.

Construction on the area surrounding The Bean prevented access to the structure for 10 months, but was completed just in time for the park’s 20th anniversary celebration.

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