Jackson Park (Chicago)
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Jackson Park is a 500 acre (2 km²) park on Chicago's South Side located in the South Shore community area, bordering Lake Michigan and the neighborhoods of Hyde Park and Woodlawn.
[edit] Site of a world's fair
The land for Jackson Park and its sister Washington Park was set aside in the 1870's. The area was originally a "rough, tangled stretch of bog and dune" owned by Mary Jackson who sold it to the city of Chicago. The park was named after Mary, who was a cousin of President Andrew Jackson. The park was designed and created by Frederick Law Olmsted, the architect of New York City's Central Park, for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The landscaped park became the foundation of the spectacular, but temporary, Beaux-Arts White City.
[edit] The park today
Every structure from the World's Columbian Exposition was long ago demolished or moved elsewhere, except the old Palace of Fine Arts, which is now the Museum of Science and Industry, and the Osaka Garden, a Japanese strolling garden reconstructed on its original site on the Wooded Isle.
Besides the Wooded Isle and Osaka Garden, sites worth visiting include Olmsted's lagoons, the gilded Daniel Chester French statue Republic (a replica of a much larger statue built for the Columbian Exposition), and the Jackson Park Golf Course.
Jackson Park is connected by the Midway Plaisance to Washington Park. In accordance with a canal that Olmsted wanted built between the two parks, a long excavation was made on the Midway, but water has never been allowed in.
Jackson Park is home to a well-studied population of feral monk parakeets, descending from pet birds that escaped in the 1960s.[1]
Jackson Park Heights is a common neighborhood name for an area abutting Jackson Park. It received its name from a low ridge that once existed south of the present-day park.
