Interesting Ideas

Montrose Harbor on Chicago’s North Side was once the site of a remarkable set of rock carvings on the limestone blocks that ran down in steps to the water. The large blocks were put in place when the harbor was built in the late 1930s, as they were in locations up and down the Chicago waterfront, and removed when the Montrose Harbor lakefront was rebuilt in the early 2000s. The remarkable carvings — dozens of them — were demolished along with the blocks that hosted them and are lost forever. At that time the lakefront carvings were virtually unknown in

The section of Chicago’s shoreline that abuts Morgan Shoal in Hyde Park is home to more than 1,100 rock carvings made over the last 90+ years by mostly anonymous creators. These include the city’s earliest dated carvings, back to 1930.  This stretch of shore, from around Hyde Park Boulevard to 45th Street, is also the most deteriorated, with the old limestone revetments that once protected the parkland in a state of disrepair or, in some places, disappearance.  But hundreds of carvings are still findable by the intrepid searcher, at least for now. The city has funded a major reconstruction of