ABSTRACT
This chapter recounts the historical context for the founding of Grant Park Concerts (now Grant Park Music Festival) in 1935. The Park District, in cooperation with James C. Petrillo and the Chicago Federation of Musicians, launched a major festival during the Great Depression in Chicago’s Grant Park. Union leadership, municipal government, and support from the federal Works Progress Administration helped employ large numbers of professional musicians and park workers and reach huge audiences. The concerts were ostensibly “by Chicago, for Chicago” in an effort to draw people into the Grant Park and promote a sense of civic pride rooted in local ensemble’s performances, but policies mandating who performed, programming, and social norms governing park usage complicate the notion of civic unity promoted by the festival. The festival laid the groundwork for the formation of a musical public that engaged with the city park in ways particular to modernism.
