Garden
Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool
Hidden Prairie-style water garden of limestone outcrops and native plantings, once nearly grazed to bare mud.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool in Chicago traces the site from an 1889 Victorian hothouse pool built for tropical water lilies, through its 1930s ruin and landscape architect Alfred Caldwell's WPA-era remake into a miniature limestone gorge, to the early 1950s when the zoo turned it into a bird sanctuary. Caldwell called it a dead world when he came back to see it, decades later, speaking flatly to a newspaper reporter.
This audio guide was created using AI.