Columbus Park National Register of Historic Places Listing

Jens Jensen had an obsession. He hated the stiff, geometric European gardens that rich Chicagoans kept building on the swampy flats of Cook County. Instead, Jensen wanted to recreate the wild Illinois prairie inside the city limits. He got his chance in 1915. On a 135-acre patch of land in the Austin neighborhood, he began shaping Columbus Park. It took five years. Jensen scooped out soil to create a winding, lazy river that actually hid a concrete lining, then framed it with native wildflowers, sugar maples, and grey dogwoods.

He hauled in tons of stratified limestone. Workers stacked these flat stones to mimic the natural bluffs of the Rock River. Water dripped over them into a simulated glacial spring. It looked ancient. Jensen also built a stone "council ring." This low, circular bench invited people to sit together around a fire, completely equal, with no head of the table. But politics almost ruined the whole thing. In 1920, the West Park Commission fired Jensen because he refused to hand out patronage jobs to local political hacks. They finished his park anyway.

Interstate 290 ate part of the south edge in the 1950s. Despite that highway scar, Columbus Park remains the most complete realization of Jensen's Prairie School design left in America. That is why the federal government put it on the National Register in 2003. Walk through it today. You will see golfers dodging the water hazards, kids playing near the refectory, and monarch butterflies hovering over milkweed. It is a living piece of Chicago's environmental soul. He proved his point.