Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark

by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, The Chicago History Museum

At its opening on July 16, 2004, Chicago’s Millennium Park was hailed as one of the most important millennium projects in the world. “Politicians come and go; business leaders come and go,” proclaimed mayor Richard M. Daley, “but artists really define a city.” Part park, part outdoor art museum, part cultural center, and part performance space, Millennium Park is now an unprecedented combination of distinctive architecture, monumental sculpture, and innovative landscaping. Including structures and works by Frank Gehry, Anish Kapoor, Jaume Plensa, and Kathryn Gustafson, the park represents the collaborative efforts of hundreds to turn an unused railroad yard in the heart of the city into a world-class civic space—and, in the process, to create an entirely new kind of cultural philanthropy.
        
Timothy Gilfoyle here offers a biography of this phenomenal undertaking, beginning before 1850 when the site of the park, the “city’s front yard,” was part of Lake Michigan. Gilfoyle studied the history of downtown; spent years with the planners, artists, and public officials behind Millennium Park; documented it at every stage of its construction; and traced the skeins of financing through municipal government, global corporations, private foundations, and wealthy civic leaders. The result is a thoroughly readable and lavishly illustrated testament to the park, the city, and all those attempting to think and act on a monumental scale. And underlying Gilfoyle’s history is also a revealing study of the globalization of art, the use of culture as an engine of economic expansion, and the nature of political and philanthropic power.

Born out of civic idealism, raised in political controversy, and maturing into a
symbol of the new Chicago, Millennium Park is truly a twenty-first-century
landmark, and it now has the history it deserves.

Genres: Architecture

442 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

My assignment for Art History class was to compare an example of ancient art with a similar one in current times. I chose the Colosseum in Rome and the Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millenium Park, Chicago. This book proved to be an amazing resource which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. Unlike other books that I have rushed to return to the Library, I kept it to continue reading even after I had completed my paper. It's highly readable and gives some interesting background to the development of Millenium Park that I hadn't previously known. I highly recommend the book, better still, visit the Park!

[Maria Baglai · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book at the annual book fair organized by the Newberry Library in Chicago. It cost me close to nothing. Three years later, as I’m finishing writing my own book about Chicago , I can appreciate Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s work to the full extent .it’s a source of valuable information about the construction of our beloved Millennium Park and it contains many photographs rarely available to the public . It’s a piece of well documented Chicago history I’m happy to own in my library.