Garfield Park

In 1871, William Le Baron Jenney created a master plan for the city's West Park District of three parks and connecting boulevards, and at what would later become Garfield Park he used a swampy site to create a lagoon with two wooded islands and a suspension bridge, along with a semicircular drive at the Washington Boulevard entrance that included two fountains and a children's play area. Originally called Central Park because it lay in the middle of the plan, the park was renamed in 1881 after the assassination of James A. Garfield, the 20th President of the United States. The park was extended westward in the early 1880s under plans by Oscar F. Dubuis, who had previously worked under Jenney. In the 1890s, at the height of bicycling's popularity, a dirt horse racing track built in 1875 was replaced with a concrete track for horses and bicycles, and a Flemish Revival-style powerhouse and an octagonal bandstand with a formal promenade, now known as Music Court Drive, were built. After the turn of the century, Jens Jensen, creator of the Prairie style of landscape architecture, completed unfinished sections of the park as superintendent of the West Park Commission. His notable additions included the Garfield Park Conservatory in 1906, designed with the New York firm of Hitchings and Company as a revolutionary naturalistic "landscape under glass" suggesting Midwestern haystacks, and the conservatory displays two works by Lorado Taft, Pastoral and Idyll. Jensen also created a formal garden between the bandstand and the lagoon with pergolas, specially designed benches, a water court, and a sculpture of Robert Burns. When horse racing was outlawed in 1906, he replaced the track with a golf course, the first public course on the city's west side, landscaped at the edges with masses of native plantings. Construction of Jackson Boulevard through the park in the 1930s divided the golf course, and the two meadows are now used for team sports. In 1927, a major bond issue led to construction of a Spanish Revival style headquarters building for the West Park Commission, designed by Michaelsen and Rognstad, and after the city's three park commissions were consolidated into the Chicago Park District in 1934, this Gold Dome Building became the Garfield Park Fieldhouse.

Chicago, Illinois · United States