Kup's Chicago - Irv Kupcinet [92]
In Garfield Park, plan to see the world’s largest conservatory under one roof, where as many as fifty thousand persons a day have viewed the spectacular floral displays. Notable for its gently rolling prairie terrain is Columbus Park, planned by the famed Chicago landscape architect Jens Jensen. An authentic Indian Council Ring is just one of the unusual sights to be found here.
Ringing the city is a unique, fifty-thousand-acre, wooded green belt: the Cook County Forest Preserves. Beyond this, in suburban Wilmette, be sure to visit the “Taj Mahal of the Western Hemisphere,” the delicately beautiful Baha’i Temple situated near the lake.
Take a stroll along some of our fine streets of apartment houses – Goethe, North Astor, or North State Street, tree-lined from Dearborn to Lincoln Park.
For an aerial view of the city by day go to the observation floor of the Board of Trade; or see an exciting panorama at night from atop the Prudential Building.
Since the past helps explain the present, before exploring very far, you will also want to become familiar with another significant facet of the city, Historical Chicago.
What could be a better place to begin than the Chicago Historical Society? Its multimillion-dollar archives and exhibits include not only such Chicagoana as old-time handbills and posters, and relics of the Great Fire of 1871, but also material of much broader historical interest.
Among the treasures on view are the anchor of Christopher Columbus’ ship, the Santa Maria, the weapons used by John Brown in his raid at Harpers Ferry in 1859, and a large collection of priceless Lincolniana. The Society has the table on which Lincoln drafted the Emancipation Proclamation and such important historical items as his personal carriage and the bed on which he died. Twenty stunning dioramas depict various stages of his life. There is also a directory to guide you to other points of interest in Chicago with strong Lincoln associations. One of these is the site of the old Wigwam at Lake Street and Wacker, where he won the 1860 Republican Presidential nomination.
At Michigan and Wacker a plaque and metal strips in the sidewalk mark the former location of Fort Dearborn, around which the city’s earliest Chicagoans settled. Elsewhere, plaques call attention to such sites as Haymarket Square at Desplaines Street near Randolph, where the famous anarchist riot of 1886 occurred; Mrs. O’Leary’s Barn at 558 West De Koven, where the Great Fire originated under circumstances still disputed (appropriately, today, the property is the location for a two-million-dollar Fire Department Training Academy); and the West Stands (now razed) of the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field, where Enrico Fermi’s scientific team achieved the first controlled nuclear reaction in history.
Some of our historic structures have been preserved: the venerable brownstone Water Tower, our most cherished surviving landmark of the Great Fire, at Chicago Avenue and Michigan; Hull House, the “cathedral of compassion” founded by Jane Addams at Halsted and Polk Streets, around which the new Chicago branch of the University of Illinois is being built; the old Cook County Court Building – now the Chicago Board of Health – at 54 West Hubbard, where Clarence Darrow masterfully defended Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in the celebrated “thrill-killing” trial; and the Sheraton-Blackstone Hotel, where the term “smoke-filled room” became standard political parlance after hours of maneuvering in suites 408 and 410 on behalf of 1920 Presidential nominee Warren G. Harding.
Dignified nineteenth-century town houses, conjuring a nostalgic aura of yesterday, are to be seen in the vicinity of the University of Chicago in Hyde Park, the South Side’s intellectual center. Still other handsome town houses remain in the Old Town Triangle,