The Plan called for more neighborhood parks such as McGuane Park, where children enjoyed the wading pool during the summer of 1905.

In the 1920s, Bennett’s symmetrical French vision for Grant Park (above) transformed it into one of the world’s largest formal landscapes, with Buckingham Fountain (completed in 1927) as the centerpiece. Until Congress Parkway was extended in the 1950s, it terminated with a plaza at Michigan Avenue (below) .

While the keynote of the nineteenth century was expansion, we of the twentieth century find that our dominant idea is conservation.

—Plan of Chicago, p. 32

Chicago’s existing ring of large parks, connected by leafy boulevards, had been laid out beyond the city limits starting in 1869, primarily by engineer William Le Baron Jenney. As the growing industrial city became more crowded, these pleasure-grounds were important for fresh air and recreation. The Plan of Chicago praised the system, and proposed a major expansion of it. Since density “beyond a certain point results in disorder, vice, and disease,” the Plan claims, “the establishment of adequate park area is necessary.”

By the 1900s, the fast-growing city had enveloped the original ring of parks, and visionaries like architect Dwight Perkins were encouraging the purchase and preservation of wooded areas along Salt Creek, the Des Plaines River, and the Skokie Valley. Smaller neighborhood parks were being built in dense city neighborhoods. The Plan encouraged both movements, noting the moderate cost of acquiring outlying land in advance of settlement. Though the Plan describes the natural beauty of these new parks, the appeal is to the city’s employers: “a city, in order to be a good labor-market, must provide for the health and pleasure of the great body of workers.” The Plan suggested a regional approach to creating parks in an area ranging from Kenosha to DeKalb to Michigan City.

At the center of the Plan’s vision for the city was Grant Park. Burnham envisioned a Cultural Center at the foot of Congress Parkway, including the Field Museum and new homes for the Crerar Library and Art Institute. But in 1911 the state Supreme Court decisively confirmed Montgomery Ward’s lonely opinion that the city’s original plats forbade any buildings in Grant Park. A site on new landfill south of Roosevelt Road was found for the Field Museum.

Architect Dwight Perkins and others had already surveyed the region’s most beautiful woodlands to be preserved and were working to establish county forest preserves.

This 1931 sketch shows Lake Shore Drive between Foster and Bryn Mawr on an island, creating a new marina. Instead, Lake Shore Drive was built on solid parkland in the early 1950s.