WHIRLIGIG #2: Jackson Park Perennial Garden

— Part of CCHHIICCAAGGOOSS 3: 44

A Twitter thread in Medium form —

1/ The following photos are from last weekend, when this whirligig was undertaken in advance.

2/ The Jackson Park Perennial Garden is a sunken garden in the form of a circle, mirroring its setting in what’s essentially a traffic roundabout.

3/ The circular form also derives from the water basin in Olmsted’s design. That is, his post-World’s Columbian Exposition revised design for Jackson Park.

4/ His sons, the Olmsted Brothers, were involved in this revision.

[Postscript: A full size digitized version of The Revised General Plan of Jackson Park, dated 1895, can be downloaded from here, courtesy of the New York Public Library.]

5/ The water basin in the original design was across Stony Island Avenue, on the eastern end of Midway Plaisance Park, where the Obama Library’s garage is proposed to be built.

6/ The present garden was created in the 1930s with designs by May McAdams, perhaps the first woman landscape architect of the @ChicagoParks.

7/ The Obama Foundation envisions a reflection pool at this location, thus realizing the earlier Olmsted water feature.

8/ CLIMB ME

9/9 Nearby, beside the highway running through Jackson Park, is a boulder commemorating “THE FIRST AUTOMOBILE RACE IN AMERICA.”