Park
Grant Park
Downtown lakefront green space kept free of buildings by a decades-long legal fight against commercial development.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to Grant Park in Chicago follows Aaron Montgomery Ward, the mail-order tycoon whose office tower once looked straight down on this lakefront ground, and the twenty-two-year legal fight he waged to keep it empty. It traces the city plans he blocked, from a civic center to a museum bankrolled by the Field fortune, and the newspaper that mocked him before grudgingly changing its tune. A small bronze plaque near Michigan Avenue is easy to miss among the flowerbeds, but it marks where his fight is remembered.
This audio guide was created using AI.