“This monumental building, with its two towers and long open-air promenades on the lower and upper levels, is a century-old symbol of Chicago’s love for its beaches. The grand scale of the building and the romance of its arches and inner courtyards aren’t just picturesque. They create a spectacular gateway onto a broad, beautiful beach loved and crowded for generations, even before this structure was built as an anchor in 1919.

“It’s a glorious spot, with restored natural dunes along one edge of the beach, a fountain and a fantastic view of the lake. And like so many Chicago beaches, particularly those on the South Side, an integral piece of the story has to do with the city’s deep history of segregation.

“The beach at 63rd is the eastern end of what may be Chicago’s greatest greenspace, the chain of parks that make up Jackson Park, the Midway and Washington Park. The earliest notion of bringing Chicagoans to the lake at this spot happened in 1871, when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux laid out a plan for the chain of three parks on more than 1,000 marshy acres. A series of lagoons would wind from the southwestern corner of Washington Park, about 2.7 miles to the outlet to Lake Michigan just south of where this pavilion now stands.

“A pier would have extended into the water about where a breakwater sits now. But instead what got built there was far more exciting: a 1/2-mile pier topped by the world’s first moving sidewalk. It was designed by Joseph Lyman Silsbee to carry people and their luggage to steamships docked nearby and became a sensation for fair visitors at five cents per ride. Also on this site, parallel to the lake, sat the peristyle, a domed structure with many columns and sculptures along its length. These were some of the first parts of the fair to be lost, destroyed by fire in January 1894.

“In 1917, the South Park Commission, one of the city’s several park districts at the time, said the new bathing pavilion at 63rd Street Beach would go up at a cost of $167,000, or about $4.34 million in today’s dollars. It was to be the South Side counterpart to one completed in 1916 at what’s now Clarendon Park on the North Side. Somewhat similar in design, with two towers and an open-air promenade on the second floor, the Clarendon Park Municipal Bathing Beach building eventually changed roles, when lakefill expanding the park to its east obliterated the beach, and it’s been renovated so many times that its likeness to this one is gone.

“For 63rd Street, the design was a mix of classical revival (the palatial arches and towers) with Chicago-born Prairie Style (the horizontality of the arms and the overhanging roofs). It wouldn’t be as ornate as the old World’s Fair peristyle that stood nearby, because of the modern, low-cost, fast-construction material the South Park Commission chose, an aggregate concrete known as ‘popcorn concrete’ or ‘marblecrete.’ It was meant to give the walls texture, unlike flat concrete, but it meant ornamental details couldn’t be intricate.

“The building and beach were a hit. In July 1925, the Chicago Tribune ran crowd estimates for the city’s beaches on a recent hot day. Of 240,000 people who had gone to the beach on Sunday, July 12, Jackson Park’s beach had the most at 100,000. Next was Oak Street Beach with 65,000. The beach became known for water carnivals, the final round of the citywide sand castle building contest, an outdoor club’s hikes through the chain of parks and Girl Scout outings.

“By the 1990s, the bathing pavilion was rundown, with some inner reinforcing bars of the concrete sticking out after decades of wind had blasted away the surface, the Chicago Tribune reported. Weeds had taken over the pretty breezeways and the original green tile roof had been replaced with cheap gray asphalt shingles.

“‘For South Siders, it was a bitter symbol of the way their lakefront was a poor cousin to Lincoln Park to the north,’ Blair Kamin wrote in 1999 after a $6.2 million restoration brought back the building’s beauty.

“All of those efforts turned this spot back into a lovely beachfront experience, a contemporary version of what Olmsted and Vaux first envisioned 155 years ago.”

Read the full story at WBEZ Chicago

• What’s That Building? Jackson Park Bathing Pavilion at 63rd Street Beach, The structure stands as a century-old symbol of Chicago’s love for its beaches, Dennis Rodkin, Sasha-Ann Simons and Ethan Schwabe, WBEZ Chicago, 7/13/26
• 63rd Street Bathing Pavilion Chicago Landmark Designation Report, June 2004