Park It

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 23, 2006 3:39PM

What can be said about Millennium Park that hasn’t already been said? If the horse is dead, can we still beat it?

There is more to be said, and Timothy Gilfoyle is the one to say it. Gilfoyle is a professor of American History at Loyola, and knows loads about Millennium Park. His new book “Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark”, starts with the history of the park back in the 1850’s and brings us up to the modern day. But Gilfoyle isn’t messing around. He has done over fifty interviews with the parks creators, documented it in each stage of its design, and somehow manages to explain the complicated financing of the park.

Millennium Park has been compared before to the Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893, when Chicago took a huge step to become a cultural Mecca instead of a big-shouldered dirt-heap. When Burnham planned the fair, he made sure to hire New York architects to build the classic Beaux Arts buildings that made up the Court of Honor. Burnham played it safe; utilizing a style of architecture he knew would go over well.

Chicago architects got relegated to the background and some, like Louis Sullivan, were pissed. They wanted to build something new, something original; something like the crazy new skyscrapers going up in the sootier half of the “White City”. In “The Autobiography of an Idea” Sullivan says: “Thus Architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave.... The damage wrought by the World's Fair will last for half a century from its date, if not longer."

Gilfoyle tells a similar story regarding Millennium Park, but turned on its head. In its beginning stages, SOM was set to design the park in the Beaux Arts style, similar to how the rest of Grant Park was laid out. John Bryan, (the Louis Sullivan of our modern-day scenario) who did major fundraising for the park, had different ideas. He didn’t want the same old crusty Beaux Arts park. He wanted something different, something no one had ever done before. Daley caves, Pritzker gets Gehry, and taxpayers get confused.

No doubt Millennium Park had a complicated birth, breech as it were, with its feet before its head. But Gilfoyle turns the Mill Park baby around and gives it the thump on its back that allows it to breathe.

You can see Timothy Gilfoyle on Thurs., Aug. 23., 12:30 p.m,. at Barnes and Noble, DePaul Center, 1 E. Jackson. (312) 362-8795.