One of my favorite places in Chicago is the Alfred Caldwell Lilly Pool. It’s one of those hidden, thankfully under-appreciated places where you can go and forget you’re in the third largest city in the country. Forgot you’re next to a zoo. Forgot you’re a block away from a highway.
Here’s from the city website:
Considered one of the most important historic landscapes in Chicago,
this “hidden garden” in Lincoln Park was designed by noted landscape
architect Alfred Caldwell in the Prairie School style inspired by Jens Jensen and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Like its architectural counterpart, the intent of the Prairie School
tradition of landscape architecture was to help build an appreciation
for the beauty of the natural landscape. Caldwell’s design draws from
an extensive plant palette native to the Midwest landscape and uses
stone outcroppings, a pavilion, waterfall and other features arranged
around a lily pool to create a “prairie stream,” a body of water meant
to replicate a creek running through a Midwestern prairie.
I went there last week as a chaperone to 4 second graders, including my son. We were officially at the Lincoln Park Zoo, but I wanted them to see something other than the busloads got to see.
They really loved it. So great to see what kids from the prairie do when confronted with even the slightest incline– they climb it. They loved the hidden-ness of the place, the walking over the flat stones, the rock-y water fountain, the peaked circle of trust. Best of all maybe was that they got to tell all the other kids they went somewhere that no one else on the bus had gone that day. More here.
