Long before caped crusaders swung from frame to frame in the nation’s comics, the Germans of Chicago unveiled Goethe, the Mastermind of the German People. Still standing on a sarcophagus-styled pedestal with an eagle on his knee, his classical attire keeps him as nude today as when Herman Hahn designed him in 1913.
At Goethe’s unveiling, Lincoln Park was already Chicago’s great lakefront garden, an Eden of sorts complete with elephants, lions, swans and picnickers in its zoo, introduced in 1868. Otherwise the park, meandering along a natural ridge, was all nature and had been there, so it seemed, for millenniums.
But like the rest of Chicago’s lakefront, Lincoln Park is all man-made, every inch of it. Stretching some 6 miles and covering more than 1,200 acres of shoreline, the Park was a swamp with sand dunes before it became a cemetery in 1837.
Chicagoans eventually removed most of the bodies from their graves and, inspired by Central Park in New York, gave the shoreline a naturalistic style complete with winding pathways, hills, dales, flower beds, ponds and eventually, statues. Yet Lincoln Park’s nature not only changes with the seasons, it changes with fashions, styles and conveniences. Not only do statues relocate, ponds come and go. Where once calm sailboats prevailed, the motor craft is raucous today.
How to record these changes? In pictures, of course! Postcards tell it all, but only since 1893 when William Goldsmith sold a set of 10 views of the World’s Columbian Exhibition to tourists to mail home for a penny. Already tried in Europe, the idea caught on quickly in the U.S., and, coupled with new chromolithograph printing, spread across the nation. Postcards were democratic, too, because most everyone could afford them, and cards featured everything imagination could print. Of course, color printing helped. It was exciting to see color and to send it. It still is, as these more recent photographs prove.
For more information, contact the Lake County Museum, home of the world’s largest collection of postcards, the Curt Teich Postcard Archives.
