Vintage Chicago Tribune: Unexpected finds in Chicago parks

Chicago Tribune

12-06-2025

Ah, it finally feels like summer in the city. We can't wait to spend as much time outside as possible.
But did you know your favorite Chicago park might have a secret past? These are some of the unexpected things we found when looking through the Tribune's archives.
In parks featuring lagoons, Park District officers were kept busy chasing poachers who fished without a permit. Some parks — Lincoln, Garfield and Washington among them — had holding cells in their field houses. The Park District police were consolidated into the Chicago Police Department at 12:01 a.m., Jan. 1, 1959.Named for the territorial border agreed to by the Pottawattomie and the U.S. government, this park formerly featured a zoo. The first animal housed there was a single black bear named Teddy. It was donated by Frank Kellogg, president of the now-defunct Park Avenue Park District. Pheasant, ducks and an opossum followed. More recently, varieties of goats, exotic farm chickens and roosters and an African water fowl called the one-acre zoo inside the 13-acre park home. There is now a nature center and a bird migration area at the park, but no zoo.As the oldest park in Chicago, the 3-acre landmark was the landing spot for many people who lost their homes after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The space earned the name 'Bughouse Square' — American slang for a mental health facility — in the early 1900s when people would come to the park to stand on soapboxes and crates to give long lectures about their theories, passions and ideologies — no matter how addled, goofy or, indeed, sharp and smart.
Some of the people who used to speak and argue in the park were famous: Carl Sandburg, Emma Goldman, Eugene V. Debs. Others were anonymous anarchists, dreamers, lunatics, poets and preachers.The sprawling lakefront park is home to Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago History Museum, beaches and bodies.
Burials took place in the Chicago City Cemetery, which was north of North Avenue along the lakefront and outside the then-city limits. Bodies were later relocated to other cemeteries due to a variety of factors — city expansion northward, health risks associated with rising lake levels and their proximity to decaying bodies buried in shallow graves, and a lawsuit concerning one of the cemetery's sections.
But some were probably left behind, Helen Sclair discovered. Her suspicions were confirmed after visiting the Illinois Regional Archives Depository at Northeastern Illinois University.
Tribune reporter Ron Grossman wrote, 'Sclair seems to have been the first to guess that the archive might contain records of the old lakefront cemetery. … Eventually, she found more than 600 relevant documents, had them photographed, then copied by hand their virtually illegible 19th century handwritings.'
Today, the tomb of innkeeper Ira Couch is the most visible reminder of what the area was used for, but as many as 12,000 bodies might still lie below ground.Successive open-air 'floating hospitals' in Lincoln Park were built between the 1870s and the 1900s, and offered excursions from the piers on Lake Michigan.
In 1914, the Chicago Daily News offered to fund a more permanent sanitarium building. Opened in 1921, the impressive Prairie-style structure was one of several Lincoln Park buildings designed by Dwight H. Perkins of the firm Perkins, Fellows, and Hamilton. Perkins, an important Chicago social reformer and Prairie School architect, designed buildings, including Café Brauer, the Lion House in the Lincoln Park Zoo and the North Pond Café.
The impressive Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Sanitarium building was constructed in brick with a steel arched pavilion with 250 basket baby cribs, nurseries and rooms for older children. The breezes through the shelter were believed to cure babies suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases. Free health services, milk and lunches were provided to more than 30,000 children each summer until 1939, when the sanitarium closed. Major reconstruction of Lake Shore Drive led to the demolition of the building's front entrance. During World War II, the structure became an official recreation center for the United Service Organization. The Chicago Park District converted the building to Theatre on the Lake in the early 1950s. Today it's a lakefront restaurant and venue that hosts concerts and theater events.Formerly named for Stephen A. Douglas, the senator from Illinois and noted Lincoln debater, the Chicago Park District board of commissioners voted on Nov. 18, 2020, to officially rename this park in honor of abolitionists Anna Murray Douglass and Frederick Douglass.
Though many parks around the city now have swimming pools, Douglass Park became the first to have one devoted to recreation.
Immigrants who lived in this area in the mid-1890s petitioned to have Chicago's first outdoor public swimming pool built there. When it opened in August 1896, the Tribune reported 15,000 people braved bad weather to celebrate with a parade.
'The German, Polish, and Bohemian athletic societies in the city had charge of the exercises. Long before the hour set for the beginning of the procession hundreds of uniformed Turners and bicyclists gathered … It was estimated that 3,000 men were in line. The procession consisted of four divisions, each headed by a band.'
A pool still exists in the park. It is used for day camps, classes and open swims.Chrysanthemums were in bloom when the Washington Park Conservatory debuted at 56th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in late 1897. Heated by exhaust steam piped in from a plant 700 feet away, the new 'floral castle' provided South Siders with a warm respite and lush surroundings inside the 425-foot-long hothouse constructed of stone, iron and glass. Thirty-foot-tall palm trees flourished under the conservatory's main dome and exotic fruits trees, ferns, grasses and vines were also mixed in.
Washington Park long a site of change, controversyThe conservatory held exhibitions throughout the year, but plans were made in 1936, to tear it down. Its structure was deemed weak and too expensive to repair. A Park District police station was later constructed at 57th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. The DuSable Black History Museum and Education Center opened there in 1973.The South Shore neighborhood was, like much of Chicago, a place where ethnic groups came and went. Yet above the club's porte-cochere, its arched entrance way, was a sign proclaiming that the South Shore Country Club was: 'For Members Only.'
'Until it closed in 1974, the club was, in the coded language of the time, 'restricted,'' Grossman wrote in 2016.
'Remember that this was a private club in its time and if you were Black or Jewish, forget about it,' a Chicago Park District official told the Tribune in 1984, when the club was renovated, prior to reopening as the South Shore Cultural Center. 'People who have never been here before will walk in and realize they are in the Taj Mahal.'
South Shore: From exclusive country club to inclusive cultural centerThe club was worthy of such hyperbole. The main clubhouse, built in the then-tony Mediterranean Revival style, featured a cavernous main dining room and grand ballroom joined by a 'passaggio,' a broad and towering corridor. It was so long that three orchestras could play in different parts of the clubhouse without interfering with each other.
Its facilities came to include a nine-hole golf course, tennis courts, a trap-shooting range, lawn-bowling courts and stables, bridle paths and a dressage ring for equestrian members. The club's Horse Show was the high point of Chicago's social season. In 1920, the club added a band shell to its music venues.
The club reached its high point of a little more than 2,000 members in 1953. But membership declined as the neighborhood's demographics changed.
In 1975, the club sold its property to the Chicago Park District. Years of squabbling followed over what to do with the site. Park District officials weren't eager to spend money on the clubhouse and athletic facilities. Maintenance had been neglected as the club's revenues shrank.
'Ironically, Blacks — many of whom are now fighting to preserve the structures — were barred from the grounds except to work,' the Tribune observed in 1977.
In the end, the neighborhood won. The buildings and grounds were renovated and now host jazz festivals, the restaurant Nafsi, art exhibitions and lectures. Michelle and Barack Obama held their 1992 wedding reception there.
Thanks for reading!
Subscribe to the free Vintage Chicago Tribune newsletter, join our Chicagoland history Facebook group, stay current with Today in Chicago History and follow us on Instagram for more from Chicago's past.