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A foul stench from Grant Park continually wafted into Aaron Montgomery Ward’s Michigan Avenue office, and by 1890, the mail-order magnate was fed up. He filed a lawsuit to compel Chicago to enforce a long-forgotten rule: the 1836 Illinois canal commissioners’ decree that the lakefront from Randolph Street to what is now Roosevelt Road be “a common to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever.”
By the late 19th century, the area had become a lawless shantytown and a makeshift stable for circus elephants and camels, which added their waste to heaps of debris dumped in the park after the 1871 fire. But once Ward won his suit in 1897, the Illinois Supreme Court forced Chicago to remove every structure that had cropped up on the lakefront except for the Art Institute and the Illinois Central Railroad Company tracks. Ward’s court battles continued for several years as he fought the encroachment of a proposed National Guard armory and the Field Museum on the site, but the tide was turning for the world’s first continuous public lakefront.
Beach-volleyball enthusiasts owe an equally great debt to Daniel Burnham: As Chicago’s population skyrocketed from 100 in 1830 to 1.1 million in 1890, the amount of green space per resident plummeted. Burnham suggested connecting the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition fairgrounds at Jackson Park to Grant Park with six miles of landscaping for public recreation. Now known as Burnham Park, this project helped shape Burnham’s seminal Plan of Chicago, a 1909 document that described the infrastructure and improvements Chicago needed to ensure its future prosperity. “The lakefront by right belongs to the people,” Burnham wrote, recommending the city turn all of it into a public park. His advice inspired the construction of Navy Pier and Lincoln Park’s expansion northward; today, 29 miles—or four-fifths—of the lakefront is accessible to all. And if Friends of the Parks gets its way, Spandex-clad cyclists may soon be pedaling the last four miles: Peter J. Kindel is one of four local architects and planners helping the nonprofit develop a plan to complete Burnham’s vision. “[The plan] should be finished in 2009, the centennial of the Plan of Chicago,” Kindel says.
