The Garfield Park Bandstand, built 128 years ago to host live musical performances, is undergoing a $2.2 million restoration after spending decades in decay and disuse.
The work includes restoring the marble cladding on the bandstand’s 1,600-square-foot cloverleaf-shaped base and also fixing up the mosaic panels along the structure’s parapet.
And the bandstand’s most visible feature — an ornately-detailed copper dome that’s a showstopper, even in its long-dulled state — will be restored as well.
Garfield Park and the West Side can benefit from this kind of encore. The bandstand hasn’t been used since the 1990s and hadn’t seen a significant rehabilitation or restoration since the 1950s.
Chicago Park District Preservation Architect Michael Fus, who is overseeing the project, said the bandstand is worthy of the glow-up.
“I love this structure,” he said. “It’s a jewel box in Garfield Park.”
‘High quality and beautiful’
Built in 1897 just east of Hamlin Avenue along Music Court Drive on the southern half of the historic West Side green space, the bandstand isn’t as well-known as the 184-acre park’s famed conservatory or its magnificent golden-domed Garfield Park Field House at 100 N. Central Park Ave.
But the bandstand is a fine architecture in own right, designed by Joseph Lyman Silsbee — one of the top architects of the day who was Frank Lloyd Wright’s first Chicago employer — at the top of his game.
Chicago parks were built to provide a momentary escape from the city, but Silsbee took the escape even further by giving the bandstand a revivalist style informed by the classic architecture of India and the Middle East.
“I think that it really shows how during the late 19th century and the early 20th century, there was such such a strong commitment to [the idea that] every structure in a public park should be of a very high quality and beautiful,” said historian Julia Bachrach, author of “The City in a Garden: A History of Chicago’s Parks.”
“Concerts, public free gatherings, music in the park were just a huge part of Chicago life,” she said. “The fact that [the bandshell is] so very ornamental and so lovely just kind of ties into the whole philosophy that everything that would be designed in these parks during that period would have that level of thought and expense and effort.”
The bandstand is beautifully sited in the center of Music Court, a circular drive. Archival park district photos from the bandstand’s early years show crowds packing the street and the surrounding parkland to listen to whomever was on the bandstand.
Musicians would enter the bandstand at ground level then climb a spiral staircase to the top of the structure’s marble base, then play to those crowds from beneath that big copper dome.
Will live music return to the bandstand once the restoration is completed this fall? The structure hasn’t been used since the 1990s.
“Ideally, it would be used for performances again,” Fus said. “We don’t have a plan in place yet. But I envision Music Court circle could easily be closed off [for] farmers markets or public events. So we’re hoping to work with the community to identify uses.”
Park district does the right thing
The Chicago Park District began the bandstand restoration in 2023 then halted it when the weather turned bad. Work resumed last year and has been carrying on since.
MoDE Architects is handling the restoration while Marion Restoration is making the mosaic panels look new again, Fus said.
The bandstand is also getting new plumbing and electrical systems, the park district said. New perimeter paving, landscaping and an accessible pathway are also being added.
There will be a new spiral staircase inside, too.
The Chicago Park District gets — and deserves — all the smoke for the sad conditions of far too many of its buildings and green spaces on the city’s South and West sides.
But credit is due here in Garfield Park.
Here’s hoping the work happening there now restores the bandstand to its architectural glory while giving West Siders a properly programmed venue they can enjoy.