PA RK HISTORY:
Promontory Point From Landfill to Landmark E XC E R P T BY
CHICAGO PARKS FOUNDATION
In this edition of Park History, our friend, historian and author Julia Bachrach takes us through Promontory Point’s evolution from landfill to landmark. The CPF has been lucky to help dedicate many park benches at the Point.
BET WE E N TH E LEAVES
Read more of Julia Bachrach’s work at jbachrach.com
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Julia Bachrach
Promontory Point is a much loved, visited, and photographed Chicago park, with its iconic limestone revetment, beautiful landscape, and historic fieldhouse. The Promontory Point Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that supports the preservation of the park, hired Julia Bachrach to prepare landmark nomination reports for the Point. Thanks to the Conservancy’s tireless work and Bachrach’s scholarship, the Point has been listed in the National Register of Historic Places since 2018, and, since the writing of this piece, it was also officially designated a Chicago landmark in Spring 2023. This local landmark designation affords Promontory Point even greater protections, ensuring its long term preservation thanks to decades of community advocacy. Excerpted from Julia Bachrach’s “Promontory Point: A Lovely Lakefront Landscape” (2020) Promontory Point is a 40-acre peninsula at the south end of Chicago’s Burnham Park, a lakefront park made entirely of landfill. In the late 1930s, when Burnham Park was being completed, Chicago already had a 50-year history of creating new parkland using lakefill. By then, coastal engineering techniques for extending parks along the lakefront had become quite sophisticated. The complicated method for creating lakefront parkland during the 1930s involved driving rows of enormous timber pilings into the bottom of Lake Michigan and then using steel rods to anchor and tie the pilings together. The resulting “cribs” were then filled with huge rocks. Tremendous quantities of fill such as construction debris were added between the cribs and the
Photos: Aerial View of Promontory Point looking southwest, ca. 1940. Chicago Park District Records: Photographs, Special Collections, Chicago Public Library; Burnham’s vision for a linear park along the lakefront between Grant and Jackson Parks included a peninsula at its south end. Plan of Chicago, 1909, Plate L.
shoreline. Sand harvested from the bottom of Lake Michigan (including locations in Indiana and Michigan) was also used in the filling process. At Promontory Point, the entire peninsula was topped with black soil. To create an attractive outer edge that would withstand erosion, large limestone blocks were placed in a step-stone fashion along much of the park’s eastern perimeter. This step-stone revetment became an iconic part of Promontory Point’s landscape. The initial idea for Promontory Point dates back to the early 20th century, when renowned architect and planner Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912) was developing a visionary plan for Chicago’s lakefront. Having served as Director of Works for the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, Burnham proposed preserving part of Jackson Park’s fair site and creating a lakefront greenspace to stretch between the fairgrounds and downtown. He envisioned a long ribbon of greenspace with islands, a promontory, a harbor and lagoons, boathouses, bicycle paths, and a scenic roadway. This ambitious idea for
new lakefront parkland became an important aspect of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, authored by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett. Although Burnham’s proposal had broad support, the project proved to be extremely challenging. Not only would it be quite expensive, but, to move forward on the ambitious scheme, park administrators needed to secure riparian rights. They also had to obtain approvals from every level of government, even the Secretary of War, because Lake Michigan was a navigable body of water. These efforts were underway when Burnham died in 1912. After all of the necessary approvals were finally in place by 1920, Chicagoans voted in favor of a $20 million bond issue to fund the first phase of what would become the 600acre park. Filling operations progressed slowly. In 1927, although the park was still largely unfinished, the South Park commission named the new park in honor of Burnham. The landfill project dragged on, and by the late 1920s, there was little progress south of East 31st Street. By this time, Burnham Park had been selected as the site for Chicago’s second World’s Fair, A con’t pg 12
