An aerial tour of Chicago the "City in a Garden," whose park system is considered the most important in the country.
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The history of Millenium Park • The history of Millenn...
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Building the Obama Center • Building the Obama Pre...
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Forest Preserves • Coming May 2016 - Chic...
0:00 Intro
0:12 Millennium Park
1:14 Boulevards
1:37 30 miles of waterfront parks
1:55 Italian touring cyclist
2:44 Obama Presidential Library location
3:39 View from 1,000 feet up
4:20 Meigs Field Battle
5:45 Park history
6:56 Jane Addams
7:20 Fieldhouses
7:41 Cook County Forest Preserves
8:32 Riverwalk
The most popular park in the city is Millennium Park, which opened in 2004. It features the seamless, liquid mercury-inspired Cloud Gate sculpture that locals affectionately call “The Bean,” the 11,000-capacity Pritzker Pavilion and Great Lawn, and a hybrid video-fountain sculpture. The brainchild of Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, Richard M. Daley, sits atop parking garages and a major commuter rail terminal-making it the world's largest rooftop garden.
Surrounding downtown is Chicago’s system of boulevards-the first comprehensive greenway in a major US city. Linking numerous parks, these wide, grass and treelined streets were designed for leisurely strolls, cycles, or drives, and they help explain Chicago’s motto: “City in a garden.” And then, of course, there’s the one feature that truly sets Chicago apart: nearly every inch of its 30-mile lakefront is a park.
Right nearby is the site of the nearly complete Obama Presidential Center, which is rising in the southside neighborhood of Hyde Park, right next to the Museum of Science and Industry-the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere and one of the only buildings remaining from the 1893 Fair. The Obamas’ presidential library, like their home for 8 years in DC, is adjacent to a long public lawn, the Midway Plaisance, which connects Jackson Park with Washington Park to the west, forming one of the largest continuous urban public spaces in the country.
In fact, Washington Park’s large open green was where the Olympic stadium would have been if the city had succeeded in its bid for the 2016 Summer Games.
The Midway also runs through the University of Chicago, one of the best colleges in the world.
But one of the most ideal vantage points for viewing Chicago’s public lands is from the top of 875 North Michigan Avenue, formerly known as the John Hancock Center. Nothing beats viewing the world in 360 degrees from 1,000 feet up, even if the air was thick with smoke from wildfires in Canada. Turns out, it took a bizarre showdown between Mayor Daley and the Federal Aviation Administration to remove the last major hurdle blocking uninterrupted access to Lake Michigan.
For years, the city had been trying to close a small airport called Meigs Field on Northerly Island, which - after 9/11 - it also viewed as a clear security threat. Yet these efforts were repeatedly blocked by the FAA. So in the middle of the night in 2003, Mayor Daley took matters into his own hands.
Daley’s 22 years in office easily make him the Chicagoan whose impact is most felt in the city today. This incident sums up his bold, action-oriented leadership style.
Chicago Parks District historian Julia Bachrach.
Virgil K. Brown and Jane Addams. Her famous settlement house started as an effort to help poor immigrants in her Chicago neighborhood but grew into one of the most powerful social reform movements in history.
Addams became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
Chicago’s fieldhouses. These park buildings are for the community to gather or exercise, no matter the weather.
Another amenity in the surrounding counties is the Forest Preserves, an unrivaled network of prairies, woods, and wetlands.
“People in the city don’t really know about the forest preserves. They’re kind of a wonderful green emerald ring around the city. The forest preserves are owned by the taxpayers and it's about 69,000 acres - 11% of our land - it’s a wonderful, wonderful asset.”
Cook County President Toni Preckwinkle
It’s now the largest urban preserve in the United States.
Chicago Riverwalk