Lincoln Park
Lincoln Park is a 1,200 acre (4.9 km²) park along Chicago, Illinois' lakefront facing Lake Michigan.
The park stretches from North Avenue (1600 N) on the south to Ardmore (5900 N), just north of the Lake Shore Drive terminus at North Hollywood Avenue. It is Chicago's largest public park. It has many recreational facilities including 15 baseball areas, 6 basketball courts, 2 softball courts, 35 tennis courts, 163 volley ball courts, field houses, a golf course, and a popular fitness center. It includes a number of harbours with boating facilities, as well as public beaches. There are landscaped gardens, a zoo, the Lincoln Park Conservatory, the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and a theater on the lake with regular outdoor performances during the summer.
History
Added to the national register of historic places in 1994, Lincoln Park began its existence as City Cemetery. In 1864, the city council decided to turn the 120 acre cemetery into a park. Permission was received from all descendants to move graves with one major exception. The Couch family, who owned a small mausoleum in the cemetery, refused to give their permission. To this day, the Couch mausoleum can still be seen, standing amidst trees, behind the Chicago History Museum. Ira Couch, who is buried in the tomb, was one of Chicago's earliest innkeepers, opening the Tremont House in 1835. Couch is not the only person to still be buried in Lincoln Park. In 1852, David Kennison, who claimed to have been born in 1736, died and was buried in City Cemetery. Kennison claimed to have been the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party. As recently as 1986, construction in the park has revealed more bodies left over from the nineteenth century.
Another large and important group of graves relocated from the site of today's Lincoln Park was that of approximately 6,000 Confederate prisoners-of-war who died at Camp Douglas (located south of downtown Chicago near the stockyards). The prisoners held there in 1862-65 died largely as a result of the terrible conditions of hunger, disease and privation existing at that notorious Federal prison. Today their gravesite may be found at Oak Woods Cemetery in the southern part of Chicago. A one acre (4,000 m²) mass grave and a monument erected by Southerners and Chicago friends in 1895 immortalizes these Southerners whose remains were interred in the North, originally buried at the site of today's Lincoln Park and removed after the American Civil War.
Yet another aspect of the park were the violent events that took place during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. These events transpired around the convention center, Grant Park, Old Town, and the park adjacent (on Clark St.) called Lincoln Park.
I pointed out that it was in the best interests of the City to have us in Lincoln Park ten miles away from the Convention hall. I said we had no intention of marching on the Convention hall, that I didn't particularly think that politics in America could be changed by marches and rallies, that what we were presenting was an alternative life style, and we hoped that people of Chicago would come up, and mingle in Lincoln Park and see what we were about.
— Abbie Hoffman, from the Chicago 7 trial
Zoo
- See also: Lincoln Park Zoo
Lincoln Park is, perhaps, best known for the Lincoln Park Zoo, a free zoo which is open year-round. Two sections of Lincoln Park Zoo have been set aside for children. The first is the Pritzker Family Children's Zoo. The Children's Zoo contains an indoor structure for children to play in. The second area of the zoo for children in the Farm-in-the-Zoo, presented by John Deere. This small farm contains pigs, cows, horses and other animals which can be found on farms. Children can feed and pet the animals. In addition, the cows are milked in public for children to see.
Near the southern end of Lincoln Park Zoo, one can rent a paddle boat for a spin around the Lincoln Park Lagoon. The Lagoon is surrounded by trees and offers a relaxing time (and, of course, paddling exercise). Kayakers and canoers also take to the lagoon and one can often see scullers as well.
Art
Lincoln Park is known for its statuary. Walking through the zoo and into the park, one sees many of Chicago's great works of art. Just as there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Grant Park, there is a memorial to Ulysses S. Grant in Lincoln Park overlooking Cannon Drive at the south end of the zoo. The sculpture was created in 1891 by Louis Rebisso. There is also a statue of Lincoln in Lincoln Park, the Standing Lincoln (1887), by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the same sculptor who created the Sitting Lincoln in Grant Park. A standing Lincoln can be seen behind the Chicago History Museum. The only other person who is immortalized by statues in both Grant and Lincoln Parks is Alexander Hamilton, the Lincoln Park statue sculpted by John Angel. John Gelert's Hans Christian Andersen (1896) on Stockton Drive provides a tribute to the Danish storyteller. The Eugene Field Memorial (1922) designed by Edward McCartan remembers the Chicago Daily News columnist and poet who wrote "Little Boy Blue" and "Winken, Blinken, and Nod." William Ordway Partridge's statue of William Shakespeare (1894) provides a third great story-teller in Lincoln Park. This seated Shakespeare provides a lap for children to climb onto. A bust of Sir Georg Solti, the former conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra also lived just to the west of the zoo until it's migration to Grant Park in October, 2006. Statues of the German poets Goethe and Schiller can also be found in Lincoln park. The large Goethe statue is located near Diversey and Stockton. The smaller Schiller statue is located near the western entrance to the zoo. Finally, a statue of John Peter Altgeld (1915), the nineteenth-century Illinois Governor who pardoned the Haymarket Square rioters, can by seen just south of Diversey. This statue was created by Gutzon Borglum, whose name may be familiar as the sculptor of Mount Rushmore.
Recreational Areas
Lincoln Park has many specialized spaces for recreational activities. Lincoln Park contains playgrounds, a golf course, tennis courts, boating facilities, playing fields for football, baseball, soccer, and areas for horseback riding.