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Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool
It's a name that keeps a lot of people from entering. This Lincoln Park garden was just
a lily pool back in 1889 until the 1930s. Then the Chicago Park District had to figure out what to do with 15,000 WPA workers. Alfred Caldwell supervised a section of Lincoln Park -- just after returning from two years of building a pavilion and rock garden at
Eagle Point Park on a bluff on the Mississippi River at Dubuque, Iowa. And so the lily pool that reopned in 1942 is really a rock garden with a pool fed by waterfalls, lots of trees that are older than Chicago and a council ring on a hill southeast of the pool. |
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We don't have many hills in Chicago -- where I live in a building designed by Mies van der Rohe. I wonder if Mies ever visited Caldwell's rock garden when he was supervising construction of the 30-story building on the west border of Lincoln Park in the early 1960s. When Mies came to Chicago in the 1940s to head the Illinois Institute of Technology he asked Caldwell to join the staff. |
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Caldwell, who had attended the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign for two semesters in the early 1920s, got his bachelor's degree from IIT in the 1940s for his on-the-job experience. Caldwell later taught at the University of Southern California until he was required to retire at age 70. He returned to IIT and taught architecture until his death in 1998 at age 95.
Return to Chicago's Lincoln Park: A Secret Garden |
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