We’ve had a lot of architects in this town, some of them — Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Jeanne Gang and on and on — rising in notoriety and star-status equal in the civic celestial realm to ballplayers and politicians and mobsters.
But one who does not consistently reach such heights is Alfred Caldwell. Though he worked closely with famous collaborators and mentors — Frank Lloyd Wright, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Jens Jensen — he was something of a cantankerous sort, and landscape architects, which he was, were then rarely accorded the stature of their contemporaries, those who designed buildings, and often exercised their self-promotional skills. Still, he created here and elsewhere some of the most stunning and life-affirming spaces in this land.
He lived what the late architecture critic and newspaperman M.W. “Bill” Newman called a “thundering life,” and my friend, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic for this paper Blair Kamin, now retired, wrote, “Anyone who expected him to always be a nice man talking sweetly about flowers was in for a rude awakening.”
But he made masterpieces. I have long been an admirer of Caldwell, growing up within easy walking distance of one of his creations. It is at the northern end of the Lincoln Park Zoo, a three-acre oasis of trees, limestone paths and a meandering pool, what Caldwell called “a cool, refreshing, clear place of trees and stone and running water.” Created in 1936, with Caldwell using some of the money from cashing in his own $250 life insurance policy, it was a bird sanctuary and first known as the Zoorockery. It had fallen on hard times by the 1990s, until a beautiful renovation. In the wake of Caldwell’s death on July 3, 1998, it was renamed, fittingly, the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool.
Now, many others, especially South Siders, might prefer his Promontory Point. That’s the man-made peninsula constructed of landfill in the late 1930s and jutting into Lake Michigan at 55th Street. It has thick groves of trees and shrubs surrounding a central meadow and a seawall made of limestone blocks arranged in a series of steps leading to a promenade. It is just what Caldwell wanted: “A place you go to and you’re thrilled — a beautiful experience, a joy and delight.”
Few people know as much about Caldwell, or admire him more, than Julia Bachrach. She is a historian and parks expert, an author (including 2001’s terrific “The City in a Garden: A Photographic History of Chicago’s Parks”) and consultant in private practice. She is busier than ever since retiring from the Chicago Park District after nearly three decades in 2017. She is also the author of the National Historic Landmark listing for Caldwell’s Lily Pool, as well as the recent National Register nomination for Promontory Point.
She lives in Chicago, but will soon be on her way to Dubuque, that delightful Iowa river city where, Friday and Saturday, she will be part of a symposium organized by Heritage Works Dubuque. Titled “The Prairie School Legacy in Iowa” it will also feature John Waters from the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy and Paul Kruty of the University of Illinois.
“People who know and follow Wright know that he designed a number of Prairie School houses in Iowa,” Bachrach told me. “But they are kind of spread out. A person can come to Chicago and in one day see an awful lot of Wright homes. That’s not true in Iowa, where you have to move around.”
We talked a bit about the very well known Wright and she then began to explain how it was that Caldwell, with his wife Virginia and their baby Carol, came to move from Chicago to Dubuque, and how he worked day and night with some untrained locals during the Depression to build Eagle Point Park, dotted by what Bill Newman called “enchanted park buildings.”
Caldwell’s whole life was lived on the edge. He once said, “The Depression made me belligerent and I have been belligerent ever since.”
That’s just some of what Bachrach will be talking about later this week, as well as explaining some newly-discovered details about the history and design of Eagle Point Park and the city’s plans to preserve it.
“It is just magnificent, sitting on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi,” she said.
There will be guided tours of the park and Wright’s Walter House in Quasqueton, Iowa. If you are staying close to Chicago, know that the Lily Pool is closed these days, as it undergoes another renovation. Bachrach’s best guess is that it will be open on July 11, meaning there will be a lot of summer left in which to see it.
Promontory Point is there for the strolling.
rkogan@chicagotribune.com