1930 Proposed Park Extension Montrose Ave. to Lawrence Ave.
DESCRIPTION
This Lincoln Park Commissioners blueprint, dated March 29, 1930 and approved in April, lays out the park extension between Montrose and Lawrence Avenues that produced Montrose Harbor, Montrose Beach, new park drives, traffic circles, recreation grounds, and a lakeside golf course.
The plan shows a curving headland sheltering a “Boat Harbor,” a wide bathing beach, and landscaped parkland, with a profile of the proposed road grades along the base of the sheet. It is an ordinance-level drawing used to authorize grades and fills rather than a finished construction set, and it carries commissioners’ signatures and the note that “EL” figures mark elevations above the city datum.
The harbor and surrounding landforms were not natural features. They were created through a northward extension of Lincoln Park by building offshore breakwaters and placing extensive landfill behind them. Park District histories document that much of Lincoln Park’s shoreline is man-made and that the Montrose to Foster extension, advanced in the late 1920s and carried into the 1930s with New Deal era momentum, formed the peninsula, harbor, and beach seen today.
This map is an ordinance-level plan produced for internal use by the Commissioners of Lincoln Park. For this reason, it is extremely rare and we could not identify any other existing examples of the map in any institutional holdings.
CONDITION
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