Chicago's Grant Park - ing
Chicago's Grant Park is called the city's front yard. The lush gardens provide great views
of the city skyline and the shores of Lake Michigan. It wasn't always this way. In the 1870s this green belt was a marshy mess full of floating debris from the city's sewers. To make matters worse, the northern end of today's park once served as a large parking area for thousands of rail cars belonging to the Illinois Central railroad.
City planners slowly filled in the original shoreline of the lake with landfill. By the 1950s
the downtown business district was in desperate need of parking. So instead of building ugly, concrete parking decks above ground, the city buried them underground, covered with Grant Park landscape. However, the northern edge was still a wasteland of abandoned rail tracks sitting far below the grade line of the expanding park, literally a hole in the ground. In the 1970s, a parking garage was finally built where the trains once stood, and the roof deck of the new facility was turned into a vast green space. Most people would never know that the park they are strolling through sits on top of a subterranean parking lot. But, when you stumble upon one of the metal grate openings scattered throughout the lawn area, you've found a piece of the parking deck just beneath your feet. These concrete curbs frame the upper portion of an air supply ventilation system which draws fresh air into the garage below.
This 19.5 acre green lid contains three sections: the Daley Bicentennial Plaza with its ice
skating rink, the Cancer Survivors Garden, and the appropriately named Peanut Park. This parcel of Grant Park was never a popular destination. One problem is that it sits isolated from the rest of the park because of Columbus Drive, a roadway that slices the area in two like a gigantic knife gash.
When Mayor Daley II decided that an older section of Grant Park fronting Michigan Avenue
needed a revamp, the reborn area now known as Millennium Park, was connected to the forlorn Bicentennial Plaza, et al, with a bridge. Frank Gehry's serpentine structure spans the tear created by Columbus Drive, and the hardwood deck enclosed in a brushed, stainless steel skin, functions more as a curiosity rather than a crossing. No one seems interested in visiting the older sibling to the east, and if they do, they quickly exit back in the direction of the pretty, younger sister to the west.
background /Images & Artwork: designslinger]
If you decide to traverse the BP Bridge on a sunny, summer day, be sure to wear your
sunglasses and be prepared to wring out your clothes after spending several minutes in the oven-like heat generated by the reflective surfaces of the deck and the siding. The views are worth a little discomfort however. And, once you make your way into the Lurie Garden section on the Millennium side of the park, there is a stream waiting for you where you can sit, cool-off, and stick your feet into the cold water if you're so inclined.
There are plans afoot for the Bicentennial Park area to undergo a substantial face lift
because the water proof membrane covering the 1970s-era garage roof is leaking. Therefore the old rooftop garden has to be stripped away in order for repairs to be made to the disintegrating concrete surface below. So another new park may be on the way.
Posted by designslinger at 9/2/2009 2:30 AM 
Categories: Architecture,Gardens
Tags: Daley Bicentennial Plaza BP Bridge Lurie Garden Millennium Park
Categories: Architecture,Gardens
Tags: Daley Bicentennial Plaza BP Bridge Lurie Garden Millennium Park
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