Among the attractions of this park are the conservatories, palm-house, lily-ponds, and flower-beds; a small zoological collection; a fountain illuminated at night by electric light; the statues of Lincoln (by Saint-Gaudens), Grant (by Rebisso), Beethoven, Schiller, La Salle, a Mounted Indian, and Linnaeus; and the boating lake. Near the main entrance is the Academy of Sciences, containing admirably arranged and classified collections illustrating the various natural sciences.
Grant Park, consisting of a public pleasure ground of two hundred and ten acres, lies between Michigan Boulevard and Lake Michigan. This park has been improved of late by the depression of the tracks of the Illinois Central Railway and by the construction of massive stone viaducts connecting the park proper with the lake shore. The adjoining part of the lake, between the shore and the breakwater, has been filled in and added to the park. In Grant Park, to the south of the Auditorium and opposite Eldredge Place, is an equestrian statute of General John A. Logan, in bronze, by Saint-Gaudens.
The South Side parks are also fine. They are best reached by Michigan Avenue and Drexel Boulevards, two fine residence streets with tasteful houses and ornamental gardens. Michigan Avenue also contains several churches, the Calumet Club, numerous large hotels and apartment houses, and the First Regiment Armory. In Drexel Boulevard is the handsome Drexel Memorial Fountain.
Washington Park (three hundred and seventy-one acres) and Jackson Park (five hundred and twenty-three acres) are connected by a wide boulevard known as the Midway Plaisance, on which is located the University of Chicago.
The West Side parks, Douglas Park, Garfield Park, and Humboldt Park are little inferior to those of the North and South Sides.
The University of Chicago, between Fifty-sixth and Fifty-ninth Streets, occupies probably the finest group of buildings, architecturally, devoted to higher education in the United States. The total value of buildings and equipment is more [598] than thirty million dollars, one-fourth of which was contributed by citizens of Chicago and the balance by John D. Rockefeller. The ground has an area of sixty-six acres, and the university includes faculties of Arts, Literature, Science, Commerce and Administration, Education, Medicine, Law, and Divinity.
Above thirty different buildings have already been erected, mainly of limestone and in a Gothic style, from the designs of H. I. Cobb and Mr. Coolidge. Perhaps the most successful group is that at the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Lexington Avenue, including an Assembly Hall, a Students’ Club House, the University Tower, and the University Commons. Other important buildings are the Cobb Lecture Hall, the Kent Chemical Laboratory, the Ryerson Physical Laboratory, the Law School, the Anatomy, Physiology, Zoology, and Botany Buildings, the Walker Museum, the Haskell Oriental Museum, the handsome Bartlett Gymnasium, dormitories for women and dormitories for men. On the south edge of the campus stands the main structure of the Harper Memorial Library, an enormous Gothic building by Shepley, Rutan & Coolidge, erected in memory of President Wm. R. Harper. The Yerkes Observatory, at Williams Bay on Lake Geneva, containing one of the largest refracting telescopes in the world, belongs to the University of Chicago. Connected with the University is the large School of Education, facing the Midway Plaisance, between Monroe and Kimbark Avenues.
Other notable educational institutions include the Lewis Institute, founded and endowed by the late Mr. A. A. Lewis and opened in 1896, comprising a School of Arts and a School of Engineering, tuition in which is furnished at a nominal cost; and the Armour Institute, a well equipped institution for higher technical education, endowed by its founder with three million dollars.
Hull House, at the southwest corner of Polk and South Halsted Streets, is a social settlement of men and women, furnishing a social, intellectual, and charitable center for the surrounding district. It includes a free kindergarten, a coffee-house, a residential boys’ club, a theater, a labor-museum, and a free gymnasium, while classes, lectures, and concerts of various kinds are held.
The famous Union Stockyards (“Packingtown”) are in South Halsted Street, five and one-half miles to the southwest of the City Hall, and may be reached by the South Halsted Street or Racine Avenue trolley-lines, both running directly to the main entrance at Forty-first Street. The yards proper cover an area of about five hundred acres, have twenty-five miles of feeding-troughs, and twenty miles of water-troughs, and can accommodate seventy-five thousand cattle, three hundred thousand hogs, fifty thousand sheep, and five thousand horses. From two-thirds to three-fourths of the cattle and hogs are killed in the yards, and sent out in the form of meat. About thirty thousand workers are employed by the packing-houses. Chicago is the greatest live stock and grain market in the world.