ABSTRACT

Grant Park is the Beaux-Arts centrepiece of Daniel H. Burnham and Edward H. Bennett’s 1909 Plan of Chicago. It sits on reclaimed land at the pivotal point where the third largest city in the United States meets the western shore of Lake Michigan. Part of the site was originally designated as a park – under the name Lake Park – in 1844 (Cremin 2013: 8). It was extended as a result of railroad construction and through refuse disposal – particularly after the ‘Great Fire’ of 1871 – but construction of the park to the current layout did not commence until the last half of the 1920s and it remains ongoing with the opening of Millennium Park in 2004 and of Maggie Daley Park in 2015. Grant Park is regarded as the ‘Front Yard’ of Chicago. It is where Queen Elizabeth II came ashore on an official visit in 1959, where Pope John Paul II held a Mass in 1979, where the Chicago Bulls celebrated their six NBA championships in the 1990s, and where Barack Obama celebrated his presidential election victory in 2008, making it ‘one of the earth’s most famous public open spaces’ (Bachrach 2009: 11).