The AIDS Garden Chicago, begun in 2019, is set to open in spring 2022. ‘This is a legacy project’

CHICAGO -- Owen Keehnen remembers when the AIDS epidemic, which disproportionately affected the LGBTQ community, was at its height in the late 1980s. The gay community in the United States was still largely in the shadows, said Keehnen, a writer and historian of LGBTQ history in Chicago.

Gay bars and gathering spaces had blackened or tinted windows so passersby couldn’t see in. But, Keehnen said, there was a place in Chicago were the LGBTQ community could feel safe while in the open, and that was the Belmont Rocks. A stretch of stone and grass on the lakefront from Belmont to Diversey harbors, the Belmont Rocks was a place the gay community from the 1960s to the late ’90s