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.
It would be 25 years before the present bathing pavilion was built in their place, though a pavilion was built nearby in the 1890s. In the meantime, the popular beach on this part of the shoreline was at 57th Street, anchored by another ornate building from the fair, the German building, lavishly ornamented with eagles and floral garlands in the plaster leading up its 150-foot tower. That building, just east of what’s now the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, burned down in 1925 and the beach there is without such a fanciful feature…