The lions. One on each side of the stairs, bronze gone dark green except where the weather has scrubbed it back to gold, and both of them ignoring you completely. These are the meeting point for the entire city. Chicagoans don't say the corner of Michigan and Adams. They say, meet me at the lions.
The man who made them had no business making them.
Edward Kemeys served as an artillery officer in the Civil War, came out, tried farming, and failed at it. So he took a job in New York at two dollars a day, swinging an axe on the crew clearing ground for Central Park. Manual labor, no prospects. And one day, on that job, he watched a sculptor modeling the head of a wolf.
He went home and made a wolf out of wax. His first attempt. And it was good enough that people bought it, and then bought the next one, and within a few years a laborer with no training at all had become the first American sculptor to specialize in animals.
The part I like best is what he did with the money. He didn't bu
y a studio in Paris. He went west, to Wyoming, and lived out among hunters and trappers so he could watch real animals move. That's why these two aren't heraldic lions with tidy curly manes off a coat of arms. The muscle under the shoulder is right. The weight is right. The man had watched things that size actually walk.
They were unveiled in eighteen ninety-four, a gift to the museum from a woma
