Hyde Park

By Leslie Hudson

First founded in 1853 by New York lawyer Paul Cornell, who named the community after the famous London park, Hyde Park was incorporated in 1861 and in 1889 the village was annexed to the City of Chicago. At the time of annexation, Hyde Park was extremely large in size, extending from 39th to 138th Streets. Today the area stretches from Lake Michigan to Cottage Grove Avenue and 47th to 59th Streets.

The 1890s was a time of great growth for Hyde Park. The construction of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Jackson Park had a profound and lasting effect not only on Hyde Park and the city, but on the entire country. The famous University of Chicago was founded in 1890 and was under construction simultaneously with the World's Columbian Exposition. The area grew, attracting additional businesses, people, and an expanding economy to the area.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Oct 15, 2003
• ISBN: 9781439614716

Leslie Hudson

Leslie Hudson, the daughter-in-law, is a Bible teacher and speaker, free-lance writer, and piano teacher. She desires to see women turn to God's Word for Biblical principles to use in building and strengthening their relationships. Connie Lovett Neal, the mother-in-law, is a free-lance writer, a Bible study leader, and a public school teacher. She believes that women will only find peace and contentment in their relationships when they listen to God's voice, not the world's.

Book preview

(VOH-1916)

INTRODUCTION

Hyde Park is an especially appropriate subject for a postcard history book. Among Hyde Park’s many claims to fame—host to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, location of the world-famous University of Chicago, site of the first controlled self-sustaining nuclear reaction, home to Nobel laureates and famous comedians—is a lesser-known distinction. Hyde Park was the birthplace of the picture postcard in America. The first picture postcards were sold from the top of the Eiffel Tower during the Paris Exposition of 1889 and were a great success. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Hyde Park in 1893, followed the Paris example and printed a series of ten World’s Fair views. Originally called simply postals, or Souvenir Mailing Cards, the little rectangles of cardboard soon became a national craze. In the years following the Fair, millions were printed, mailed and collected, with the peak in interest coinciding with the period of greatest growth for Hyde Park. The result is an abundant supply of images documenting the parks, hotels, amusement parks, and university buildings of Hyde Park as they looked in the early part of the 20th century.

Hyde Park’s history began 40 years before the introduction of postcards, in 1853, with a land purchase by a young lawyer from New York. His name was Paul Cornell and the 300 acres of land he purchased, six miles south of downtown Chicago, he called Hyde Park. He had a dream of a lakeside suburb and a formula to achieve it. He believed the following elements would ensure the community’s success: good transportation, a tidy grid-like city plan, no (or only clean) industries, a church, a hotel, parks, and an institution that would provide stability for the community with steady employment for its residents. Except for the establishment of an institution (which didn’t occur until 1890 when the University of Chicago settled in Hyde Park) all of the other elements came together in fairly short order, and Hyde Park flourished. In 1889, the village was annexed to the city of Chicago.

Cornell’s greatest legacy, after the founding of the town itself, may have been his foresight in forming the South Park Commission and his choice of firms to design its parks. Cornell hired the successful landscape designers Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, planners of the highly-acclaimed Central Park in New York City, to draw up plans for the parkland adjacent to Hyde Park. Their report was printed and submitted in 1871, and included the design of a lakeside and interior park, with a connecting strip in between. The whole ensemble was called South Park. In 1881, the separate divisions were formally named Jackson Park and Washington Park, although the term South Park continued to be used. Washington Park was developed first and its landscaping was completed in 1883. When Chicago was chosen to host the World’s Columbian Exposition, Washington Park would have been a natural choice for the fairgrounds. The South Park Commissioners were concerned, however, that all their work and costly improvements would be destroyed by a fair and its attendant swarms of visitors. Olmsted, who had been hired to select the site and eventually design the grounds, preferred the lakeside location of the undeveloped Jackson Park and felt there were advantages to having a blank slate to work upon. For these and additional reasons, Jackson Park was selected as the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Rolling out his plans from 20 years earlier, Olmsted reworked his lagoon and island ideas into a design for the exposition grounds. He felt the natural setting of the waterways and island would complement and soften the massive exposition buildings planned for the Fair. The buildings themselves were designed by a team of architects who, in the interest of architectural harmony, had decided on a common building height and style. To unify the buildings even further, the buildings were painted white, which led to the popular name for the World’s Columbian Exposition—The White City. Because of the temporary nature of their use, the buildings’ exterior decorative surfaces were created with an inexpensive and easily sculpted material, a mixture of plaster, cement, and jute fibers, called staff. The choice of style (Beaux-Art Classicism) and architects (mostly from the East) influenced American architecture for years to come. The Fair’s architecture was well-received by the public, but viewed as a set-back for the architecture that had been developing in Chicago. Louis Sullivan, one of the few Chicago architects to design a major building for the Fair was especially outspoken. In later years he recalled one building in particular, the Illinois State Building, as a lewd exhibit of drooling imbecility and political debauchery. In addition to its impact on architecture, the World’s Columbian Exposition had other profound and long-lasting effects on the nation, ranging from ideas on urban design to the introduction of shredded wheat.

After the Fair ended, most of the structures were demolished or succumbed to fire. Besides the large exhibition halls, smaller structures had been built for states, foreign governments, and assorted lesser exhibits. A few of these smaller buildings and exhibits remained in Jackson Park as late as the 1940s. The Japanese Buildings, for example, remained on Wooded Island for many years and were much-admired. They are, in fact, believed to have influenced Frank Lloyd Wright in the development of his Prairie School style, which was fully expressed 13 years after the Fair in his design for the nearby Robie House. The German Building was turned into a park restaurant. The Life-Saving Exhibit became a U.S. Life-Saving Station and La Rabida Convent became a children’s sanitarium. The Columbus ships remained moored in the motor boat harbor for many decades.

Hyde Park had established itself as a resort destination well before the World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1857, Paul Cornell built a hotel called the Hyde Park House at 53rd Street and Lake Michigan, and among its guests were the Prince of Wales and Mary Todd Lincoln. The first attractions that drew visitors to Hyde Park were the lake and the escape Hyde Park provided from downtown congestion. Later, Washington Park, the beautifully landscaped Drexel Boulevard, and the Washington Park Race Track, built just south of Washington Park in 1883, enticed many Chicagoans south along Grand Boulevard (now Martin Luther King Jr. Drive) and Drexel Boulevards on what became a popular carriage circuit. In anticipation of the World’s Columbian Exposition, many additional hotels were erected to accommodate Fair visitors. They remained after the Fair, as lodging for visitors to the later attractions as well as providing housing for residents. Looking at the community now it’s hard to believe that Hyde Park was once a kind of Orlando, Florida, of its day. In the years following the World’s Columbian Exposition, a number of amusement parks and attractions were established in south Hyde Park and Woodlawn, patterned after the successful Midway and World’s Fair attractions. Most had failed by the end of the 1930s, but