The Boulevard System

Chicago’s boulevards form one of the nation’s largest and oldest boulevard systems, a 28-mile network with 540 acres of green space linking seven inland parks and Lake Michigan. Once built on the city’s outskirts, they now encircle Chicago’s heart and lie within three blocks of the homes of one out of every six residents. In 1837, when Chicago adopted the motto Urbs in Horto, "City in a Garden," the city had very few parks. Developer John S. Wright proposed a vast connected chain of parks and boulevards, and after two decades his idea gained support through the 1869 Illinois parks bills, which created three regional park commissions to build a unified system linked by pleasure drives. The South Commission hired Frederick Law Olmstead, the West Commission’s lead designer was William LeBaron Jenney, and later Jens Jensen gave the west parks and boulevards a more natural Prairie-style character with native plantings, while legal challenges blocked the North Commission’s design for Diversey Parkway. Much of the system was built during the late 19th-century real estate boom, and the boulevards became popular places for promenades, horseback riding, and carriage travel along exceptionally smooth roads, while also attracting residential development, including grand mansions along Grand, now King Drive, and Drexel boulevards. Chicago’s grand park system gained national attention during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park and along the Midway Plaisance, helping inspire similar park and parkway systems in Kansas City, Minneapolis, and Washington, D.C. In the early 1930s, the three park commissions were consolidated into the Chicago Park District, which maintained the boulevards until 1959, when responsibility passed to the City of Chicago. The system remains a testament to the vision that helped make Chicago a national model, and it includes monuments and fountains honoring figures and themes such as Francis Drexel, the Ages of Man, Carl von Linne, Thomas Masaryk, the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, George Washington, Vietnam veterans, William McKinley, Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, American youth and Independence Day, and Illinois statehood.

Chicago, Illinois · United States