Parks in Chicago
8 parks to discover with Bad Historian in Chicago.
Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool
A hidden prairie in the middle of a city of three million people.
Cloud Gate
You already know it's a bean. Everybody knows it's a bean. Its name is Cloud Gate, the sculptor is Anish Kapoor, and he has spent roughly twenty years being quietly furious that the city looked at his masterwork and named it after a…
Lincoln Park Zoo
One of the last free zoos in America. Started with two swans.
Nature Boardwalk
You're walking on milk jugs. The skyline view is the money shot.
Grant Park — The Fight to Keep It Empty
Turn back toward the skyline and notice what's missing. There's a solid wall of towers along Michigan Avenue, and then, between that wall and the water, a long green nothing.
Northerly Island
Made from garbage. Destroyed by bulldozers at midnight. Now a nature sanctuary.
The Library Branch and the Reading Garden
The low building with the courtyard. In the reading garden there's a bronze sculpture of a bird coming up off an open book, and it's called Book Bird. That's a Richard Hunt. If you don't know the name, you know the work.
The Women's Garden
The Women's Garden. Planted beds, low walls, a place laid out to be sat in rather than walked through. The Foundation describes it as a living memorial to the power of civic participation. All of that is new.
Chicago Audio Experiences
Visit these parks and more on a self-guided audio experience.
Bootleggers, Bullets & Baloney
Al Capone ran a hundred-million-dollar beer empire, bathed three times a day, and lost it all to a tax form. A singer got his throat cut for switching nightclubs. A bank robber broke out of jail with a pistol carved from wood. Walk Prohibition-era Chicago from the Green Mill — where you can still drink in Capone's booth — down to the vanished hotels of the South Side, past the massacre site that's now a lawn and the cathedral where a man was gunned down in daylight. Most of it is documented. A few small things I slipped in myself. See if you can spot them before the reveal.
Museum Campus: Landfill of Dreams
Everything on this campus stands on ground Chicago manufactured out of a burned-down city. A marble temple holds the most complete Tyrannosaurus rex on Earth, found because somebody got a flat tire. An aquarium a thousand miles from the sea got filled by hauling a million gallons of ocean up from Key West in railroad tank cars. There's the first planetarium in the Western Hemisphere, a two-thousand-year-old Roman column Mussolini sent as a thank-you gift, and a downtown airport a mayor erased with bulldozers at one in the morning. Walk the lakefront from Buckingham Fountain to Soldier Field. Nearly all of it is documented. A few small things I mixed into the fill myself. See how many seams you can find before I show you.
Steel, Stone & Ego
Chicago burned to the ground in 1871 and stacked the strangest concentration of ambition in America on top of the ashes. A newspaper tower studded with 149 pieces chipped off other people's landmarks. An office whose steel skeleton went up in fifteen days. A brick tower so heavy it sank twenty inches into the mud, so you step down into 1891. Two round concrete towers — the tallest apartments on Earth the day they opened — bankrolled by a union of janitors. And forty stories up, a goddess of grain with no face, because the sculptor assumed no one would ever build high enough to look her in the eye. Walk the Magnificent Mile into the Loop to Cloud Gate. Nearly all of it is documented. A few small details are mine, set into the true ones where they blend in. See how many seams you can find before the reveal.
The Best Free Day in Chicago
One of America's oldest free zoos. A Victorian glass house. A hidden garden designed by a man who cashed in his life insurance for flowers. And roughly twelve thousand unmarked graves. All free.
The Obama Library Tour
They carved a speech into the side of the Obama Presidential Center — four hundred and fifty-eight concrete letters, each one taller than you are — and the engineers nearly couldn't build it, because of the letter S. This is the story of the most expensive presidential center ever put up, told through the things you can actually stand in front of: a tower its own architects wanted smaller, a font borrowed off a men's fashion magazine, a granite skin cut to a sixteenth of an inch, a free public gym, a garden that replaced a garden, and a six-lane road Chicago simply deleted. It is also, technically, not a presidential library. Nearly all of this is documented. Two small things are mine.
The Postcard Tour
Chicago's greatest hits, and the stories behind them. A river the city reversed so its sewage would flow toward Saint Louis. A newspaper tower with 149 chunks of other people's landmarks — the Parthenon, the Great Wall, the Alamo — bolted into the walls. Two towers everyone calls the corn cobs, financed by a union of janitors. A public library England stocked with 8,000 signed books before Chicago had gotten around to building one. And a mirrored sculpture that showed up to its own unveiling unfinished. Walk the Magnificent Mile into the Loop, from the Water Tower to the Art Institute lions. Nearly all of it is documented. A few small things I slipped in myself — see how many you can catch before the reveal.
Hear the stories behind these places
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