Promontory Point

From Landfill to Landmark

EXCERPT BY

Julia Bachrach

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.

Read more of Julia Bachrach’s work at jbachrach.com

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 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.

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.

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 Century of Progress. With preparations for the fair underway, filling operations reaccelerated. Held at the height of the Great Depression, A Century of Progress gave fairgoers a sense of optimism about the future.

At the time, the South Park Commission was one of 22 independent park districts operating contemporaneously in Chicago. All of these agencies were in financial crisis due to the Depression. To gain access to funding through FDR’s New Deal, the 22 agencies were consolidated into the Chicago Park District in 1934. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) soon provided substantial fundings, and completion of the 55th Street Promontory was an important priority for the fledgling Chicago Park District.

In 1936, the Park District hired Alfred Caldwell (1903–1998), an extremely talented landscape architect who lacked academic credentials but was the protégé of the renowned Prairie style landscape designer Jens Jensen, known for Chicago’s Humboldt and Columbus Parks among others. Put in charge of the Promontory Point landscape, Caldwell designed a beautiful central meadow edged by shade trees and dense native understory plantings such as hawthorns, crabapples, American plum, prairie roses, serviceberries, sumac, and viburnums.

In his plans for Promontory Point, Caldwell called for four council rings - the kind of beautiful circular stone benches that Jensen had often incorporated into his landscapes. Much to Caldwell’s chagrin, however, his Park District superiors changed his specifications and built less expensive concrete hexagonal benches instead.

Over the years, Promontory Point fell into decline, and, for decades, Caldwell avoided visiting because he said he felt it would be too upsetting for him to see it in such a poor state. That changed in 1989 when, in the midst of a reform effort, the Park District asked Caldwell to consult on restoration at the Point.

Working closely with Park District landscape architects, Caldwell oversaw the construction of his originally intended stone council rings to replace the hexagonal benches that he had long despised. He also directed the selection and planting of 600 new native trees.

This restoration secured the incredible Promontory Point landscape that we still enjoy today.