An Urban Oasis

No visit to downtown Chicago should be considered complete without a stop at its Millennium Park.  So what if this park cost hundreds of millions more than it was supposed to or that it opened in 2004, a full four years after the actual millennium?  It's now a $450-million winning combination of beautiful gardens, elegant architecture and interactive entertainment spaces. 


From the 1850s until 1997, this area was an embarrassing civic eyesore, covered by the unsightly parking lots and the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad.  Now stretching east from Michigan Avenue towards the Lake Michigan shoreline, Millennium Park is a 24.5-acre urban oasis.  


Marking the park's entrance is the Cloud Gate, a photo op just waiting to happen!  

Millennium Park's Cloud Gate

This eliptical, jelly bean-shaped sculpture, comprised of 110 tons of stainless steel, was designed by Anish Kapoor. 

Chicago's Michigan Avenue is reflected in the Cloud Gate

I found it reminiscent of a carnival fun house with its crazy mirrors.  Can you find me in the following photo taken underneath the Cloud Gate?  

I'm the one in the center with my elbows out as I point my camera upward.

From the park's Lurie Gardens, you may viewed the awesome Chicago skyline.  

Designed by Frank Gehry, the park's centerpiece is the dramatic Jay Pritzker Pavillion, a band shell composed of massive stainless steel curves.  

The Jay Pritzker Pavillion

"How do you make everyone - not just the people in the seats, but the people sitting 400 feet away on the lawn - feel good about coming to this place to listen to music? questioned Frank Gehry.

The answer is, you bring them into it. You make the proscenium larger; you build a trellis with a distributed sound system. You make people feel part of the experience," Frank Gehry said of his design.

The Millennium Monument

The Millennium Monument is a replica of the original peristyle monument that stood on this site between 1917 and 1953.  Today's monument lists the individuals, corporations and foundations who contributed generously to the creation of the park.

South block of Crown Fountain

The park's Crown Fountain was designed by Jaume Plensa, a contemporary artist and sculptor from Barcelona, Spain.  Its two glass block towers are the backdrop for the video-streamed faces of 1,000 well-known Chicagoans.  

North block of Crown Fountain

The two 50-foot tall towers face one another across a wide reflecting pool that is flush with the surrounding sidewalk.  Water bubbles up to the top of each tower; then, slides in a smooth sheet down its sides to the pool below before recirculating back up to the top.  

Every twelve minutes, the projected faces to turn into gargoyles, spouting a stream of water before switching to the next image.

Millennium Park also holds an ice rink, a bicycle center with a repair shop & indoor parking facility, and Harris Theatre, an indoor venue for music and dance performances.  Of course, I was intrigued by the McDonald's Cycle Center with its indoor parking garage for cyclist commuters.

McDonald's Cycle Center

That evening, as I was viewing the contemporary art on the third floor of the neighboring Art Institute of Chicago, I noticed that an evening concert had begun in the Pritzker Pavillion.

Evening Concert at the Pritzker Pavillion

My photo hardly shows the beauty of that scene.