Wander away from the din of Lake Shore Drive’s traffic, into the shadow of Lincoln Park Zoo, and you’ll stumble into one of Chicago’s most treasured architectural marvels. No, it’s not a steeple piercing the clouds or a facade cloaked in stained glass—it’s the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool. Enshrined in Prairie-style gates, the Lily Pool is a triumph of both design and nature: Lily pads blanket the garden’s thumbprint-shaped pond, dragonflies and birds zip through the thickets of cottonwood and a stately pavilion presides over the landscape.
For the past two years, this local gem had been closed to visitors. In 2023, the Lincoln Park Conservancy closed the Lily Pool for major renovations partly stemming from the garden’s steady stream of visitors. The city decreed that it was high time to replace the iconic wooden pavilions, which had been battered by time and the Midwest’s legendarily temperamental weather. As carpenters culled through the timber, the scope of the renovation grew wider and the construction timeline drew longer. After rebuilding the pavilions, plumping the thickets of native plant and recalibrating the crown jewel waterfall, the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool reopened on September 8, welcoming visitors from dawn till dusk free of charge.
The Lily Pool’s beauty reads so effortless that it feels almost predestined, but it took a hell of a lot of work to reach this point of renown. Its pocket of Lincoln Park was originally a Victorian garden built in the 1880s for cultivating water lilies. When the pomp and drama of Victorian style fell out of vogue, the Lily Pool crumbled into disrepair until 1936, when Alfred Caldwell—the renowned architect behind Promontory Point and Riis Park—gave the garden a much-needed overhaul. Caldwell transformed the space into an ode to the Midwest’s natural ecology, carving a centerpiece pond that mimicked a melting glacier’s flow as it slices through rock. Despite his emotional investment in the project, Caldwell’s Lily Pool would once again slip into decay in the 1990s—the grove of native trees choked the life out of the garden and grazing birds finished the job. Just over a decade and a few millions of dollars later, the Lily Pool was revitalized by the city and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2006.
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Take just one step beyond the Lily Pool’s entrance, and you’ll understand its hallowed status. The thrum of traffic is supplanted by birdsong and lapping water, the sunlight streaming through lacy hackberry leaves obliterates any worry that may have trailed you to the garden’s gates. I was stunned into silence the first time I visited the Lily Pool, about fourt—let’s just say many years ago, as a freshman at DePaul University. I had become acquainted with the garden through Roger Ebert, who blogged about his frequent visits to the Lily Pool—a ritual he would continue even in the face of declining health. Ebert wasn’t the only high-profile fan of the Chicago landmark: During his 2016 trip to Chicago for Parts Unknown, Anthony Bourdain filmed a conversation between himself and Bruce Cameron Elliott—the larger-than-life Old Town Ale House regular and artist behind the bar’s famous portraits—at the Lily Pool.
While Ebert strolled around Caldwell’s grounds to affirm his own existence, I, on the other hand, hoped to soak up some of his talent by osmosis. Maybe if I walked in the literal footsteps of my literary hero, I would trip headfirst into brilliance? That certainly didn’t happen, but I did find some solace from the foibles of the world, a sense that I was exactly where I needed to be in that moment. In my estimation, that’s not worth nothing.
Whether you’re visiting to pay tribute to one of your heroes or just hoping to find a sanctuary where neither breaking news alerts nor urgent emails can find you, the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool is sure to cure whatever ails you. If it was good enough for Roger and Tony, it’s surely good enough for the rest of us.