Grant Park

Grant Park is a 319-acre lakefront park on Lake Michigan, just east of Chicago's Loop. Although the land is among the city's oldest public ground, its formal design took shape from the mid-1890s and most of it was built in the late 1920s and 1930s. Successive plans, from P.B. Wight to Edward Bennett and the South Park Commission, followed French garden precedent: symmetrical spaces, rows of trees, recessed lawn panels, fountains, terraces and sculpture, with Art Deco details added. Two main axes run through the park, one east-west through Buckingham Fountain. Features include the Beaux-Arts Art Institute building with its bronze lions, a two-level Michigan Avenue promenade with ornamental concrete rostral columns, the Logan Memorial, the Rosenberg Fountain, and Ivan Mestrovic's mounted Indian sculptures at the Congress Drive entrance. Changes include the 1953 garage built beneath the northern promenade and the 1955 Congress Drive widening, yet the nomination holds that the overall design retains its integrity.