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. It was extended westward in the early 1880s according to plans by Oscar F. Dubuis, and in the 1890s a dirt horse racing track built in 1875 was replaced with a concrete one for horses and bicycles, while a Flemish Revival-style powerhouse and an octagonal bandstand with a formal promenade, now known as Music Court Drive, were also built. After the turn of the century, Jens Jensen, superintendent of the West Park Commission and creator of the Prairie style of landscape architecture, completed unfinished sections of the park and added the Garfield Park Conservatory in 1906, designed with Hitchings and Company as a naturalistic landscape under glass whose form suggested Midwestern haystacks. The conservatory displays Pastoral and Idyll by Lorado Taft, and 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, Jensen replaced the track with a golf course, the first public course on the city's west side, but construction of Jackson Boulevard through the park in the 1930s divided it, 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 three park commissions were consolidated into the Chicago Park District in 1934, the Gold Dome Building became the Garfield Park Fieldhouse.

Chicago, Illinois · United States