Interesting Ideas

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