5 little-known facts about Millennium Park from a Loyola history professor (2024)

1. An alternate universe where the site would still be a rail yard is ‘entirely possible’

Millennium Park seems so timeless that it’s hard to imagine lakefront land lingering as a disused rail yard as it did until the late 1990s. But a few things had to go just right to make Millennium Park come to life, including where Mayor Richard M. Daley got his teeth cleaned. Gilfoyle says that in a possibly true, possibly apocryphal story, “Daley had always wanted to complete that part of the park. He would go to his dentist’s office that overlooked the northern end of Grant Park,” a space then mostly used for railroad company employee parking. “He always thought, ‘We need to cover that up. We need to complete Grant Park.'”

Acquiring the land wasn’t straightforward. “The city had been leasing the site to the Illinois Central Railroad, which wasn’t using it,” says Gilfoyle (the railroad would run a single car up and down the tracks once per year as a technicality). Chicago Park District general counsel Randy Mehrberg uncovered that Illinois Central had violated its contract. After Illinois Central merged with Canadian National Railway, Gilfoyle says, “They worked out a deal where they could get a tax write-off by giving that space back to the city of Chicago. If Randy Mehrberg hadn’t done the research, Millennium Park might never have been built.”

2. There would be no Millennium Park without parking

The park’s site was originally water, then landfill, and then, after World War II, a space for downtown parking before the railroad took over. As plans for the new park came underway in the late 20th century, planners decided an underground parking garage would be a natural way to fund the project. At one point, they considered the site as possible remote parking for Soldier Field but discarded the idea. “They wouldn’t have to use any tax dollars. They could float bonds,” says Gilfoyle. Then, to further offset costs, the city negotiated a $563 million deal to lease four city and park district-owned garages in and around Grant Park to Morgan Stanley for 99 years.

Parking even dictated some of the art in the park. “There’s a support column in the middle of Columbus Drive that holds up the BP Pedestrian bridge,” Gilfoyle says. “[Pritzker Pavilion designer] Frank Gehry wanted to cantilever out both sides of the bridge and have them meet in the middle with no column so that the bridge would’ve looked like it was floating.” However, this would mean sacrificing a large number of parking spots. “So that’s why you have that column in the middle of Columbus Drive holding up the BP Bridge.”

3. ‘The Bean’ could have been a Jeff Koons waterslide

When the park’s public art committee was soliciting projects for the park, it came close to adopting a design by Jeff Koons, known for giant sculptures depicting balloon animals, Michael Jackson, and terriers. His plan, which would have been situated where Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate stands, consisted of “a waterslide on it that was about 100 or 150 feet high. It had some unusual things on it, like his kids’ sneakers.” Gilfoyle notes that Koons wasn’t willing to share his design outside his committee, and some committee members “weren’t as enthusiastic about it.” Hence, a bean instead of a waterslide.

4. Crown Fountain was more popular than anyone expected

Crown Fountain, with its videos of Chicagoans playfully spitting water onto visitors below, was originally supposed to be a quiet spot. “The Crown family originally envisioned this to be a reflective place of contemplation where the water would be shallow enough you could you actually walk on it without your shoes getting wet.” But that’s not what happened. “The first day, it turns basically into a water park because the kids love going out there and getting all wet.” Artist Jaume Plensa was pleasantly surprised, Gilfoyle says, with how his art became a municipal meeting place.

5. The park’s secret superpower? Being easy to get to and get around

Gilfoyle says one of the underappreciated parts of the park is that it’s also an intermodal transit center. Designers placed Harris Theater to connect directly to the parking garage so suburban Chicagoans could drive into the garage, take an elevator up into the theater, see a show, and then go back down and never have to go outside. “Defenders of it said, ‘This will bring people into the city from the suburbs that might not come in because they don’t want to deal with the parking or the weather. This is a way to get them into the city.” He describes the park’s role as an intermodal, tri-level transit facility as “very distinctive.”

The entire park has also won awards for its ADA compliance, some of which are visible, like ramps. Others are more subtle. The Wrigley Monument was supposed to be an exact replica of the monument at the site designed by Edward Bennett in 1917, but the peristyle was ultimately shrunk by 10% to make room for a ramp. “Those kinds of features are largely unknown unless you are disabled in some way and you need that kind of ramp. Planners are very much aware of that, but the general public is largely unaware,” Gilfoyle says.

The Millennium Station Metra stop, roadways where cars can take conventioneers to and from McCormick Place, the pedway that goes to the Loop, three levels of car traffic along Randolph, and at least the intent of the bike station (taken over in 2022 by the Chicago Police Department), “all come together in Millennium Park as a model to try and provide different modes of transit in the city.”

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