Grant Park

Stately and elegant, vibrant and interactive, home to weekly cultural events, Grant Park is a destination Chicagoans and visitors have come to enjoy.

If the Cultural Mile is regarded as the Front Door of Chicago, so can Grant Park be considered the Front Yard of Chicago. Today Grant Park is a pastoral composition of lush gardens, sheltering trees, gushing fountains, statues and sculptures, recreation fields and tennis courts bordered by the opalescent harbor full of splendid yachts and white sails. It is also home to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Millennium Park, a major landscape and festival site with shimmering public art installations. All this is bordered by an architecturally historic cliff of buildings from the past surmounted by gleaming towers reaching to the clouds.

Few would imagine that this lovely park was first created from rubble fill of the Great Fire of 1871 that destroyed much of the city. It started life as a plat of land with only two buildings, the Art Institute of Chicago built as a prelude to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, and the Chicago Yacht Club, home to skippers of racing yachts, a heritage from the shipping past. Following building the Field Museum on the south park boundary to hold the artifacts of the World Columbian Exposition of 1893, the first plan for the park was created in the Daniel Burnham Plan of Chicago. This plan, drawing from Burnham's admiration for the great Cultural designs of Paris, has a geometric design of small parks and splendid public art installations, reminiscent of the formal gardens in Paris. It hosts concerts, festivals, outdoor movies and dance performances. Similarly the imposing entrance on Congress Street has soaring columns mounted with Indian warriors on horseback. These lead to a broad plaza with the lavish Buckingham Fountain, largest fountain in the world with its nighttime colorful display of water gushing high in the air.

At the south end of the park, the park's latest--and perhaps most controversial public art installation — has taken shape. Agora, a cast iron installation by Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz, includes 106 metal sculptures, each about 9 feet tall, shell-like, and frozen in walking movement. In many ways, Agora is a fitting companion to Jauma Pensa's Crown Fountain in Millennium Park, which features two three-story entrancing columns with changing electronic faces that spit water into a shallow basin separating the figures, a place were children love to splash and play.

Grant Park is indeed the epic center of Chicago' Cultural Mile, combining all that is historic with new art that is interactive. It could well be the garden of the city motto "Urbs in Horta", a city in a garden.