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Paved Beach page 2
 Deterioration of the paved beach provides insight into its construction. The Iowa Building can be seen in the upper left of the view. c. 1912 |
| The 593 acre portion of the South Park system
that abutted the lake was initially called the Eastern Division,
renamed Lake Park in 1875 and, finally, in 1881, Jackson Park,
in honor of the seventh president of the United States. While
the park was still largely unimproved in 1875, the pace of development
of its landscaping and facilities began to quicken in the next
five years. Following the suggestions of the district's first
consulting landscape architects, Olmstead and Vaux, artificial
lagoons were created inland that were intended to be the center
of recreational use by the public. Bathing, for instance, was
expected to take place there rather than on the edge of Lake
Michigan. Boating on the lagoon became a popular attraction and
picnic areas became available to the public. While the Olmstead and Vaux plan focused almost entirely on inland developments, the SPC's commissioners and engineers were acutely aware of the effect of the lake on the shoreline. Commissioner Cornell, for example, knew full well that much of Hyde Park's first park, East End Park at 53rd Street, had been washed away by the lake. (Andreas, p. 532). Confronting the erosive power of Lake Michigan on its shoreline early on, then, became a permanent part of the agenda of the park district's administrators. Piers aimed, in part, at containing that power began to appear. In 1875, a pier and dock were constructed and extended 200 feet east into the lake at 59th Street. This pier was extended still further into the lake where it was intended not only to help offset the wave forces of the lake but also to serve as a departure and landing point for a steamer that ran between Hyde Park and Chicago proper. Small brush and plank piers were also added. The SPC's first large scale project to protect the lakefront began in 1877 when a submerged breakwater 2200 feet long was installed from the north line of the park at 56th Street to the 59th Street outlet. Materials used included "250 oak piles, 17,500 feet of oak lumber, 3618 oak stakes, 446 cords of cedar bark and 110 cords of limestone." On the surface, 10,160 cubic yards of sand were laid to create a "permanent" beach. (1877 SPC Report, p. 22). It would not be enough. It soon became evident that the action of the lake was compromising these initial protection efforts. A new plan emerged that emphasized hardening the shoreline by paving the beach. Starting with the section from 56th Street to 59th Street in 1884 and completing it by 1888, this project would eventually extend south to 67th Street.(SPC Reports,1884, pp.11, 21-22 and 1890, pp. 23-24). Indeed, years of projects constructing concrete paved beach breakwaters further south along the lake to at least 69th Street did not end until 1911. Thereafter, the south lake front work that began in earnest in the 1920s and continued into the late 1930s grew out of revised versions of Burnham's Plan of 1909. The paved beach surface was constructed in two sections. The first section consisted of a seven foot wide strip filled with cedar bark and limestone bricks bordered by two rows of oak piles and oak stakes in a line that hugged the natural curved edge of the lakeshore under the water line. Behind it, on the beach, a second section of thousands of five to twelve inch oblong granite stones each varying in depth from a few inches to a foot were laid upon a supportive base in a mat that rose an average of 40 feet gradually from the lake to a higher level walkway. Sand, dredged from the various interior lagoons and carried on tracks to the beach by an open ore car or tram, was first laid under and later, in some areas, over these stones. Ultimately, benches were set in place in a line along the upper edge of the paved beach for visitors to sit and enjoy the view and experience the comfort of being close to the lake. It was a place to see and, as well, be seen. By the early 1900s, any attempt to keep these paved areas along the lake covered in sand appear to have been abandoned probably because the action of the lake, particularly during the winters, kept washing it away. The views accompanying this article, all dating from this later period, from 56th Street southward show this paved beach without any sand at all. Despite the fact that they were in place for many years, those bricks closest to the lake shifted and separated as the base beneath them slipped or was undermined by the force of water and weather. In later years, extending the beaches further into the lake left the old paved areas behind, covered over by sand and weeds and, by and large, forgotten. The remnants of this paved strip were rediscovered by the Chicago Park District (CPD), the Illinois Department of Transportation (IDOT) and the Jackson Park Advisory Council (JPAC) in 2002 and identified for what they were. Initially, IDOT and the CPD planned to remove the stones but the JPAC successfully prevailed upon them to retain the paved area in its current shore reconstruction project. Two plans were developed by the Park District involving reinstallation of the rocks and presented to the JPAC for its advice and consent. The design the group recommended most resembled the paved beach as it appeared over 100 years ago. A recent walk along the beach at 59th quickly revealed how vigorous an effort the Park District has launched to recapture those granite bricks. Thousands of them have been unearthed and loaded carefully into ingeniously created 34 inch by 44 inch open boxes with molded pallets at their base and their sides made of wooden sheets held in place by steel strips. At last count, they were neatly arranged in 46 rows of from four to six boxes each enclosing an estimated 30 or more stones. Uncounted others are piled in mounds of dirt and, a Walsh Construction Company supervisor informed me, an unknown number of them remain still to be unearthed. A tranquil expanse of sandy beach, from 58th Street past the 63rd Street Beach House lies grandly revealed, the tracks of heavy machinery of last summer's construction work softened by fall rains. Small purple and green bushes that have taken hold in the sand punctuate the view. Some portion of these granite artifacts of those very early protection efforts by the official public guardians of our lakeshore will eventually be laid back in place, giving new generations of lakeshore visitors the opportunity to stroll down a version of that old promenade once again. |