“Is Chicago about to ruin Jackson Park?” asks Charles A. Birnbaum, President & CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation in an opinion piece published this week in The Huffington Post. Birnbaum highlights several major projects affecting the park that in 1893 was home to the Columbian Exposition.
Plans for the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) locate it on the west side of Jackson Park lagoon (approximately where the Woman’s Building and Horticultural Building once stood), and an associated parking facility will sit on the east end of the Midway Plaisance (where several exhibits and structures stood during the Fair.) A proposal to consolidate and privatize two golf courses affects areas around Jackson Park Harbor, which in 1893 was the south side of the Grand Basin, where Machinery Hall, the Agricultural Building, Anthropology Building, Forestry Building, livestock exhibits and many other exhibits once stood. Of course, all of these structures are all long gone.
Birnbaum describes (with an accompanying map) Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux’s 1871 design for the park system, the second phase of development for the 1893 World’s Fair, and Olmsted’s third design in 1895.

Olmsted & Vaux’s 1871 South Park Plan (from the Chicago Park District).

Birnbaum opposes these new projects and reminds readers of Olmsted’s words from 1894, offering this explicit vision for Jackson Park: “All other buildings and structures to be within the park boundaries are to be placed and planned exclusively with a view to advancing the ruling purpose of the park. They are to be auxiliary to and subordinate to the scenery of the park.”