Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge / Columbia Bridge
Address: in Jackson Park at 1766 Columbia Drive
Architects: Burnham and Root
Date: 1880
Style: Naturalistic
Neighborhood: Hyde Park/Woodlawn
Overview
The Clarence Darrow Memorial Bridge, originally known as the Columbia Drive Bridge, has provided passage over Jackson Park’s lagoon for nearly 150 years. Designed by the famed Chicago architectural firm Burnham and Root and constructed in 1880, the South Park Commissioners described the bridge as the “most important work” within the park. The bridge is one of the few surviving architectural elements of the original Jackson Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, and is a rare remaining feature of the World’s Columbian Exposition, yet also predating the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Since Jackson Park’s opening, millions of visitors have traversed the bridge, traveling east-west across the park, and enjoyed picturesque views across Columbia Basin towards the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (GMSI). One of the many people who enjoyed the bridge was Clarence Darrow, famed Hyde Park resident, attorney, and activist, whom the bridge was dedicated and renamed by Mayor Richard J. Daley in 1957.
Unfortunately, the Darrow Bridge has been closed to pedestrians since 2013, when the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) erected a permanent fence to block access. The banks of the bridge are overgrown with saplings and weeds, the pavement is cracked, and the Burnham and Root-designed railing is increasingly oxidized. The historic structure is in severe need of repair, despite the continuous and admirable efforts by local advocates, who have been calling for restoration for over twenty years. Preservation Chicago calls for the city of Chicago and CDOT to sensitively address all necessary repairs and historic rehabilitation of the Darrow/Columbia Bridge, restoring access to this significant piece of Chicago’s history and its legacy of turn-of-the century city parks.
History
The Design of Jackson Park and the Columbian Exposition. Jackson Park has long served as a vital green space on Chicago’s South Side and a planned natural area along Lake Michigan. Extending between the Jackson Park Highlands, Woodlawn, and Hyde Park, the park speaks to the legacy of early beautification campaigns and open space formation in Chicago. This led to the long held vision of the Chicago Lakeshore to be declared “Forever, Open Free and Clear” to the all and for unfettered public access to the parks and lakefront lands.
In 1869 the South Parks Commission, founded by a group of civic leaders including Paul Cornell (1822-1904), the “Father of Hyde Park” and Hyde Park Township, was adopted by the State legislature. Although Chicago’s motto had been “Urbs in Horto” (or “city in a garden”) since 1837, it wasn’t until the approval of the South, West, and Lincoln Park Commissions that the city had a mechanism to formally establish new public parks. The goal of these three commissions was to form a “unified park and boulevard system that would encircle Chicago,” one that the city still boasts today.
The South Park Commission was given the task of developing the parks and boulevards to the “South of the City.” Their first act was to hire the leading landscape architects of the time, Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895) – responsible for the great success of New York City’s Central Park in 1858 – to design what was then called South Park. This park system was comprised of Eastern and Western divisions, now Jackson and Washington Park, linked by the Midway Plaisance. Jackson Park made up 593 of the 1,055-acre South Park.
Olmsted pioneered the field of landscape architecture in the United States. In addition to Central Park, he designed many prominent urban parks throughout the second half of the 19th century. Born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1822, Olmsted established his firm in Brookline, Massachusetts in 1883. The firm continued to be active under the leadership of his two sons into the mid-20th century. Besides his landscape work, Olmsted was a social reformer and environmentalist – working on the conservation efforts of both Yosemite and Niagara Falls, an abolitionist, and administrator. Olmsted is among the nation’s, if not the world’s, foremost landscape designers of his time, to leave a lasting impact on the American social consciousness and urban form.
Olmsted’s design work was guided by the natural features already present on a site. He focused on creating specific feelings and effects in the landscape and employed pastoral and picturesque styles to create naturalistic and serene scenery, intended to enhance rather than re-make a space. By respecting the “genius of a place” he sought to use the shaping of terrain to bring out the innate quality in a certain landscape.
When Olmsted surveyed the site for Jackson Park he found marshy conditions, bogs, and vegetated ridges. He cited Lake Michigan as an important natural feature that made up for the flatness of the chosen site. Communicated in a set of drawings delivered to the South Park Commission in 1871, Olmsted and Vaux planned for a series of waterways in the form of lagoons to connect Jackson Park to Lake Michigan. Delays caused by the Great Chicago Fire didn’t allow construction and improvements of the park’s land to begin until 1875. An artificial lake, still existing today as Columbia Basin, was constructed in 1879.
In 1880 the famed Chicago architectural firm of Daniel H. Burnham (1846-1912) and John W. Root (1850-1891), was awarded the commission for a bridge that would span the southern end of the artificial lake. Originally named the Columbia Drive Bridge, Burnham and Root designed the structure from masonry and iron.
Daniel Hudson Burnham was born in Henderson, New York in 1846 and after a childhood move to Chicago, became an apprentice at William Le Baron Jenney’s firm. He met his creative partner John Wellborn Root in 1872 while working at the firm Carter, Drake and Wight, and the two formed a partnership in 1873. Some of the newfound firm’s earliest work was for the South Park Commission, including the bridge over the Columbia Basin. They were named the lead architects of the World’s Columbian Exposition and went on to design a number of famed residential and commercial buildings, making them one of the most important and well-known architectural firms of the 19th century.
The Columbia Drive Bridge was planned so that a carriage drive could continue over the lake and was officially opened for the driving season in 1881. That same year the park was renamed to Jackson Park, and boaters, picnickers, and drivers flocked to the still unfinished park.
It was in fact Jackson Park’s incomplete status that led Olmsted to recommend it as the site for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition in 1890. Olmsted, Burnham and Root, and Charles B. Atwood embarked on planning the layout for the Exposition, and its buildings were primarily designed in the Beaux-Arts style, featuring contributions by a number of prominent architects. The Columbia Basin was the northernmost part of the Exposition’s lagoon system, and it fronted the monumental Atwood-designed “The Palace of Fine Arts” building, now the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry. While much of Jackson Park was completely redesigned, the basin’s form remained and became part of the interconnected series of lagoons, and the Darrow/Columbia Bridge remained as one of the few unchanged and extant pieces of the original design for the park.
The bridge’s placement was part of Olmsted’s vision to create picturesque views of The Palace of Fine Arts Building. Standing on the bridge, a fair-goer would experience a naturalistic vista, where the grand neoclassical building was framed by grassy slopes, clusters of trees and the basin itself. During the 1893 fair, tens of millions of visitors crossed the Darrow/Columbia Bridge, and traveled in boats beneath it.
After the Exposition, Jackson Park was again redesigned by Olmsted’s firm with aims to retain the picturesque qualities of the World’s Fair and serve as a space of passive recreation. Between 1895 and 1906 the redesign of the park was completed, and the Darrow Bridge was retained. After the fair, the bridge deck was later widened, and the original Burnham and Root-designed iron railing was replaced by a simplified design, overseen by Charles B. Atwood, that was reflected throughout the Columbian Exposition. The bridge in its post-fair state has remained a constant in the park amidst the city’s many changes.
Both Jackson Park and the Darrow/Columbia Bridge have been recognized with numerous historic designations. The park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and became a part of the Chicago Park Boulevard Historic District in 2018. The bridge itself is documented in the 1990 “Historic Resources of the Chicago Park District” documentation form. The bridge also falls within the parcel boundary of the 1994 Museum of Science and Industry Chicago Landmark designation, though is not explicitly called out as a contributing structure.
Physical Description
The Darrow/Columbia Bridge currently stands on the main axis of the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry (GMSI), originally constructed as The Palace of Fine Arts, and reflects the symmetry present in the museum’s exterior façade. The Columbia Basin lagoon and its naturalistic banks acts as a frame, and the bridge elevates the viewer to provide the viewshed that Olmsted intended. The experience of looking out over the bridge, both to the north and the south, allows visitors in the 21st century to authentically experience Olmsted’s original South Park concept. The location and framing of the Darrow Bridge continues the long tradition of pastoral American landscape design.
The Darrow/Columbia Bridge additionally acts as an important connector between what is now a parking lot on the eastern bank of the lagoon to the Garden of the Phoenix and Wooded Island, both accessed by the western side of the park. With the bridge blocked and closed to the public, not only is the impressive view of the lagoon and the GMSI lost, but the park is unable to be experienced fully and traversed with ease. Currently, a visitor has no way to easily access one of the main features of the park, the Wooded Island, and must walk around the museum, the East bank, or park along 63rd St. The loss of access to this bridge has severely limited access to the northern section of the park and, for Olmsted and Burnham, the focal point of Jackson Park.
The bridge is an architectural gem in its own right. With its limestone abutments, and rough-hewn stone retaining walls, the bridge displays a formal but organic and naturalistic quality. As Tim Samuelson, the Chicago cultural historian, commented to the Hyde Park Herald, “the dramatic curving swoop of the stone bridge embankment was a remarkable early effort in melding Daniel Burnham’s creative understated modernism with the Frederick Law Olmsted concepts of human discovery and wonder amidst a natural environment.” This simplified form with its minimal ornament reflects Burnham and Root’s later architectural designs for Chicago’s skyscrapers.
The limestone superstructure that remains today, as well as its retaining wall, 1895 railing, and walkway all are original to the vision Burnham and Olmsted designed for Jackson Park before and immediately after the 1893 Exposition. The bridge retains historical integrity and, despite deferred maintenance, has remained relatively unchanged over its long history.
Clarence Darrow
Although many Jackson Park recreationalists have admired and traversed the Darrow/Columbia Bridge, arguably none have done so more in the past, than its namesake Clarence Seward Darrow (1857-1938). Darrow became one of the 20th century’s most famed lawyers through his many high-profile defense cases. He represented Euguene Debs and other union leaders during the 1894 Pullman Strike, defended Leopold and Loeb, saving them from the death penalty, and is most known for his role as a defense attorney in the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial.
Attorney Clarence Darrow was born in 1857 and moved to Chicago in 1888. In 1897 Darrow moved to an apartment at 1537 E. 60th Street, adjoining the beautiful park-lined Midway Plaisance, where he had a view of the bridge crossing Columbia Basin. Darrow was said to contemplate on his cases and the mysteries of life at the bridge, as well as practice his “famous oratory on the fish in the lagoon.” Darrow was an esteemed resident of Hyde Park and stayed involved in neighborhood institutions and events until his death on March 13, 1938. According to his wishes, Darrow’s ashes were scattered in the Jackson Park lagoon.
Richard J. Daley dedicated the bridge to Darrow in 1957, and beginning in 1961, those who remember Darrow would gather on the bridge every March 13th and toss a wreath off of its side and into the lagoon.
Threat
Unfortunately, since 2013, those attempting to celebrate Darrow’s life and memory have been unable to actually set foot on the bridge. The bridge is currently owned and managed by the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), a legacy of a thankfully abandoned 1960s urban renewal proposal to run an expressway through Jackson Park. Early letters requesting that CDOT make necessary repairs to the bridge were published as early as 1968 in the Hyde Park Herald.
By 2009 the bridge was deemed unsafe for vehicles and a permanent metal fence was built to keep out pedestrians in 2013. In 2017, CDOT presented a plan for the bridge to provide pedestrian and emergency vehicle access to the Obama Presidential Center, cited just southeast of the bridge along Jackson Park’s eastern South Stony Island Avenue border. In 2021 CDOT engineers further proposed a timeline for the bridge’s repair with the completion of the project slated for the end of 2024. Unfortunately, neither plan has come to fruition.
With the construction of the Obama Presidential Center taking place just to its South, the bridge project has been postponed, though $2 million in state funding remains earmarked for its repair.
In 2024 the Clarence Darrow Bridge Preservation (CDBP) Coalition formed in response to the designation of federal funds for the demolition and replacement of the bridge, as well as suggestions that the historic limestone abutments may be replaced with concrete. Because of its location and age, any repair or demolition project is subject to both National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) Section 106 reviews. Formal Section 106 review was initiated in late 2024 but the process has seemingly stalled. Current disruptions and uncertainties around federal offices and regulatory oversight may further delay NEPA and NHPA reviews.
Recommendations
As necessary maintenance continues to be deferred, the bridge is increasingly vulnerable to further disrepair. If conditions worsen, demolition and removal are possible outcomes. In the event that elements of the bridge must be replaced to ensure structural stability and safety, the Clarence Darrow Bridge Coalition has advocated for the retention of the limestone blocks, retaining wall, iron railings, and other surviving historic elements. Preservation Chicago echoes those recommendations and is confident that historic integrity and character of the bridge can be maintained. With ambitious developments underway at both the Obama Presidential Center and the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, a rehabilitated Darrow/Columbia Bridge can reconnect not just the two sides of Jackson Park, as originally intended, but further provide a literal and symbolic bridge between these two important Chicago institutions. CDOT, community advocates, park visitors, and neighboring partner institutions all stand to benefit from a rehabilitated and reestablished Clarence Darrow Bridge.