The day before we went to Millennium Park, which was full of people, I went by myself to Humboldt Park, which is also in Chicago, for about an hour’s walkabout. Few people were there, even though it was the Friday before a holiday weekend, but maybe the population picks up on Saturdays and Sundays. Even so, the place seemed underused, considering how gorgeous parts of it are. Especially along the banks of the “prairie river” that runs through part of it – a landscape element by Jens Jensen, whom I’ve run across before.
“In 1869, shortly after the creation of the West Park System, neighborhood residents requested that the northernmost park be named in honor of Baron Freidrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1759-1859), the famous German scientist and explorer,” the Chicago Park District says. “Two years later, completed plans for the entire ensemble of Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas parks and connecting boulevards were completed by William Le Baron Jenney, who is best known today as the father of the skyscraper. Having studied engineering in Paris during the construction of that city’s grand park and boulevard system in the 1850s, Jenney was influenced by French design.
“The construction of Humboldt Park was slow, however, and the original plan was followed only for the park’s northeastern section. Jens Jensen, a Danish immigrant who had begun as a laborer, worked his way up to Superintendent of Humboldt Park in the mid-1890s… [Eventually], deteriorating and unfinished areas of Humboldt Park allowed Jensen to experiment with his evolving Prairie style. For instance, Jensen extended the park’s existing lagoon into a long meandering ‘prairie river.’
“He commissioned Prairie School architects Schmidt, Garden, and Martin to design an impressive boat house and refectory building which still stands at one end of the historic music court.”
The boat house is a fine structure.
The view of the lagoon from the boat house is nice as well.
A few people were fishing from the edge of the lagoon. I was looking at it. That was the entirety of the human presence there at that mid-afternoon moment. It was a little hard to believe that 9 million or so people live within 30 or 40 miles of this body of water except, of course, for the ambient traffic noise from nearby Humboldt Blvd. and Division St.
