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Jackson Park: 1907

Chicago circa 1907. "Lake Shore Drive, Jackson Park." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.

Chicago circa 1907. "Lake Shore Drive, Jackson Park." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company. View full size.

 

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Surprisingly unchanged +105

Google gives us nearly the exact same view. I can almost see the ghosts of the girls walking there:

The land now in the background across the water is Promontory Point, a man-made peninsula opened in 1937.

German Building

The picturesque building rising behind the stand of trees is the German Building, built for the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. This is one of the few survivors of that spectacular world's fair, which covered the whole of Jackson Park and spilled over into the nearby Midway (a block wide swath of real estate between 59th and 60th Streets, then as now connecting Jackson Park with Washington Park). The German Building faced the shore of Lake Michigan, not far from the Fair's Fine Arts Building (later rebuilt as the present-day Museum of Science and Industry). Different accounts hold that it was converted into a beach house and a museum of some sort after the Fair ended. In the wave of anti-German sentiment that accompanied World War I, it was renamed the "Liberty Building" (just as sauerkraut was renamed "liberty cabbage," I guess); the structure met an untimely end when it burned to the ground on March 31, 1925.

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