Category: Art environment

It took serious ambition to write on the rocks with such fine penmanship. Gold stars to all who left these accomplished inscriptions on the limestone blocks along Chicago’s lakefront.

The gallery on this page displays the handful of rock carvings along the Chicago lakefront whose location I’ve been unable to determine. These were shot on film before the days of GPS and reflect a record-keeping fail. However, I suspect most were from south of Montrose Harbor or the Belmont Rocks. All were lost when the old limestone revetments were torn out. Find lakefront carvings by location.

Most of the roughly 6,300 rock carvings along Chicago’s 26 miles of lakefront parks are clustered in eight main locations, from Calumet Park on the south to Osterman Beach on the north. About 200, however, can be found scattered in other spots. These include four locations where the rocks are still part of the old limestone revetments protecting the Lake Michigan shoreline — Olive Park and the 12th Street, 57th Street and 63rd Street Beaches. Elsewhere the rocks that once lined the shore have been relocated, serving now mostly as decorative elements for lakefront parks. These sites may be scattered,

It’s mostly a mystery who created the rock carvings up and down Chicago’s Lake Michigan shore. But there are exceptions, most notably the life-size mermaid that now resides south of Oakwood Beach around 41st Street. This accomplished but long-anonymous piece of stone carving eventually won recognition for its creators, with the Chicago Sun-Times unraveling its mystery in 2000. She was originally carved a couple blocks north of her current location, in an out-of-the-way spot right on the shoreline at 39th Street. Out of the way was the point: “We were trespassing,” said one of her creators, Roman Villareal, a self-taught

Chicago’s Lake Michigan shoreline hosts an amazing collective work of art, engraved on the limestone blocks that run down in steps to the water along several miles of its length. The thousands of rock carvings made by mostly anonymous creators starting in the first half of the 20th century represent an efflorescence of public art that is unique in the world, and barely acknowledged in Chicago. The carvings start at Calumet Beach Park near the Indiana state line and end 22 miles north, just south of Osterman Beach at Hollywood Avenue. More than 6,000 of these carvings have survived into

Behind La Rabida Hospital at 65th Street and Lake Michigan there is an exquisite collection of rock carvings from the 20th century. Or I should say once exquisite, as they have taken a beating from the lake and the weather in recent years. This spot, where carving began in the 1930s, includes one of the finest carved rocks along the lake, which I call the Peace Rock, as well as a compass beautifully rendered in stone. The compass, however, is on a rock that has already started sliding into the lake, and more are sure to follow absent some kind