372-acre park between Cottage Grove Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive in the Washington Park community area on the South Side of Chicago

How to Get There

Overview

Washington Park is a 372-acre (1.5 km2) park between Cottage Grove Avenue and Martin Luther King Drive in the Washington Park community area on the South Side of Chicago. Washington Park was added to the National Register of Historic Places on August 20, 2004.

Washington Park was conceived by Paul Cornell, a Chicago real estate magnate who had founded the adjoining town of Hyde Park. Cornell had lobbied the Illinois General Assembly to establish the South Park Commission. After his efforts succeeded in 1869, the South Park Board of Commissioners identified more than 1,000 acres (4.0 km2) south of Chicago for a large park and boulevards that would connect it with downtown and the extant West Park System. Originally called South Park, the property was composed of eastern and western divisions, now bearing the names Jackson and Washington Parks and the Midway Plaisance. Cornell hired Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, to lay out the park in the 1870s. Their blueprints were destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

When Olmsted first examined the property, he saw a field filled with bare trees and decided to maintain its character by creating a meadow surrounded by trees. His plan for the park called for sheep to graze as a means of keeping the grass short. Cornell convinced Olmsted to include sporting areas, although Olmsted wanted a more natural feel to the park, which included a 13-acre (53,000 m2) lake. The Western division was renamed Washington Park in 1881.

Olmsted designed the park to have two broad boulevards cutting through it, making it part of Chicago's boulevard system. From Washington Park, one can take the Midway east to Jackson Park, Garfield Boulevard west to Chicago Midway International Airport, or Drexel Boulevard north to the central city.

Interesting sights in the Park include the DuSable Museum of African American History and its sculpture garden, the Lorado Taft sculpture Fountain of Time, and an architecturally distinctive National Guard armory.

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Washington Park (Chicago park)", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0