The Chicago Reader 1991, How the Lakefront Was Won provides an insightful critical analysis of Lois Wille’s 1972 book Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront and the mythos it created.
Chicago’s public lakefront dates from 1836. That year three commissioners, appointed to supervise the sale of public lands to finance the Illinois and Michigan Canal, decided not to sell the narrow strip along the lakeshore between 12th and Madison streets. That muddy stretch, they declared on the plat, was to be “a public ground–a common to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever.” These words were the legal foundation for subsequent court challenges to various building plans in what became Grant Park; and the spirit of these words undergirds the whole of the lakefront protection movement.
It might do to examine that fateful decision more closely than Wille does, however. In 1836 the commissioners set aside land for a “common”–less a park than a public square. (The first U.S. urban parks as we would recognize them were not built until the 1850s.) Commons were used as parade grounds for local militia, for markets, public meetings, auctions, political rallies, and other business. Setting aside land for one was a sensible and commonplace provision in a new town, and arguing from that to a mandate for the recreational use of public land and a sweeping antidevelopment law has required some ingenious legal interpretations.
Most of the latter sprang from the pocketbook, if not the pen, of Montgomery Ward, the mail-order king who looked out over Grant Park from his Michigan Avenue office as if it were a sentry box. It was Ward who went to court four times, beginning in 1890, to stop a series of public construction projects in what became Grant Park, suing a succession of City Hall regimes eager to use the space for fire stations, armories, civic centers, museums, and libraries.
From the publisher,
How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? Lakefront reveals a story of social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending.
Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront's evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago's history but also the law's part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts.
The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. Lakefront compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared with more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses.
By charting its history, Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the lakefront's current status is in part a product of individuals and events unique to Chicago. But technological changes, and a transformation in social values in favor of recreational and preservationist uses, also have been critical. Throughout, the law, while also in a state of continual change, has played at least a supporting role.
Chicago Magazine has a 2 part tour of the Lakefront: Part 1 the Northside and Part 2 the Southside.
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