Some of the city’s best architecture is not only found around Chicago’s parks, but in them.
Yet for decades, the park district allowed many of its structures to fall into embarrassing disrepair.
Do I have to name names? For starters, how about places like the South Shore Cultural Center’s outdoor theater, which is a performance space that should be a civic asset. Instead, it’s been a decaying appendage on the South Side of the former country club, 7059 S. South Shore Dr., seemingly since time immemorial.
But is the Chicago Park District starting to get its act together and do right by its architectural treasures? Two current projects give me some hope.
This summer, the district resumed its restoration of the nearly 130-year-old Garfield Park music bandstand after a yearlong delay.
And the district also began the $1 million anticipated fix-up of the Gold Lady herself, Jackson Park’s gilded 24-foot tall Statue of the Republic.
The work at the Garfield Park bandstand is particularly worthy of attention. With its marble base and copper roof, the structure, located in Garfield Park on Music Court Drive just east of Hamlin Avenue, is as unique and lovely a structure as you’ll see in this town.
It’s been under rehab for more than a year. The original $2.2 million scope of work included restoring the bandstand’s marble base, mosaic panels and electrical system.
The district stopped the project last year when workers discovered “hundreds of tiny pinholes in the copper roof,” according to a park spokesperson, that could make the mosaic dome underneath vulnerable to water damage.
But the project resumed this week. The copper roof — original to the building — will be replaced with one that matches what’s there now.
“Representative decorative copper elements, including the central finial, ridge scrolls and gabled dormers, were removed [last month] and delivered to a metalworking contractor that specializes in traditional metalworking techniques and historic ornamental fabrication,” park district spokesperson Irene Tostado said.
“Elements will be replicated exactly with a high degree of accuracy, craftsmanship and fidelity to the original historic design,” she said.
How much more will all this cost? Tostado said the district won’t know until cost estimates are updated after a new assessment of the bandstand’s structural steel.
Workers are expected to start restoring the mosaic dome between August and November. The entire bandstand project should be done in December, Tostado said.
The bandstand, designed by Joseph Lyman Silsbee, was built in 1897. In its day, musicians would perform inside the Middle Eastern Revival structure, playing to crowds gathered around the circular Museum Court Drive and surrounding park land.
“The fact that [the bandstand 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,” historian Julia Bachrach, author of “The City in a Garden: A History of Chicago’s Parks” told me last year.
If done right, it’ll be a great benefit to West Side park patrons and the city to have the bandstand restored and put back into service.
The scaffolding that has arisen around the Statue of the Republic at 6401 S. Richards Dr. in Jackson Park signals the start of a complex process to repair and regild the historic but faded 1918 Daniel Chester French sculpture.
The job will entail taking off all of the sculpture’s gold leaf skin, then repairing and laser-cleaning the work before applying an epoxy primer, a base layer, a polymer base and an adhesive.
After that, the main event: hand-applying 12,000 to 15,000 pieces of 2-millimeter-thick gold leaf.
You’d almost want to see something like that — but you won’t be able. The sculpture will be encapsulated in a shroud designed to protect the unfinished work and the artisans on the job from the elements.
The Gold Lady is a pared-down replica of original 65-foot golden gilded Statue of the Republic that stood in Jackson Park during the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
Parks and architecture have always been important to Chicago. And while the park district still has miles to go when it comes to restoring and rehabbing its key places and spaces, what’s happening in Garfield and Jackson are good signs. Keep it up.