Recollections of a visit to Lincoln Park's Lily Pool with its architect, Alfred Caldwell

Chicago Tribune

3 days ago

In 1955, Alfred Caldwell walked me through the Lincoln Park Rookery, as it was then known. An oasis of green amid the city's concrete and brick, hustle and bustle, it was afterward renamed the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, in honor of the landscape architect who created it.
'When we came to the small shelter that is its centerpiece he hugged one of its pillars and grunted affectionately. Patting the stones that he had laid a half century ago,' I reported in a March 8, 1990, recounting of our tour for the Tribune.
But the heart doesn't measure life by clocks or calendars or datelines on faded newspaper clippings. My afternoon with Caldwell came to mind clear as a bell during the countdown to the Lily Pool's reopening after being closed for repairs in 2024.
I was a student of professor Caldwell's at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and our Lincoln Park visit was his final lesson: Works of art are their creator's children. They bring joy and sleepless nights. The Lily Pool at that time had been sadly neglected.
'When I was 8, I planted some radish seeds,' Caldwell said while clutching the pillar, 'and I've never gotten over the thrill of seeing the first green of those plants push up through the soil.'
Bureaucrats were not going to deny him a similar thrill from his 1937 Lily Pool design. Chicago Park District higher-ups scratched his proposed wildflower plantings as too expensive. He found a work-around.
'I cashed in my insurance policy,' Caldwell later recalled. 'I got $250.'
He hired a truck, drove to Wisconsin, bought thousands of plants, and was back in Chicago by early evening. With friends' help, he started planting the wildflowers next morning, and by early afternoon the Lily Pool was finished.
While best known for his work in Chicago, he was no fan of the city's grittier elements.
'The city is the living landscape of well over half of the population of the United States,' he lamented in an essay 'The Living Landscape.' 'The bravest fantasist could not have imagined a more hideous environs.'
Accordingly, Caldwell's refuge mimicked pre-urban Chicago. He built it with large slabs of Niagara limestone, having stratified the edges, echoing the city's limestone underpinnings, scoured by rapidly flowing ancient rivers.
To complete the illusion, the Lily Pool was dubbed a prairie river, and fed by a waterfall, since a river implies a source of water.
'This waterfall, as a work of art, is a celebration,' Caldwell said.
He recalled his hopes for his artificial Arcadia in a 1942 essay, 'The Lily Pool.'
'It was planned as a hidden garden for the people of Megalopolis, and the very poor, naturally without hope of escape in Buicks—the disadvantaged citizens of the slums– could come here.'
Caldwell knew something about disadvantaged urbanites. He was raised on Chicago's North Side by a wastrel father and a mother who struggled to put food on their table. But she instilled in him a love of books. 'To a young man nothing ought seem impossible,' Caldwell told me in 1990. 'I wore out the pockets of my overcoat, carrying copies of Spengler and Plato with me wherever I went.'
With a dream of becoming a landscape architect, at the age of 18 he enrolled in the University of Illinois. He supported himself by waiting on tables in a fraternity house. The classes were dull, the professors boring.
'No lifted word. No beautiful infallible phrase ever disturbed the pedagogical cemetery,' he said.
Dropping out, he returned to Chicago, and with youthful bravado suggested a partnership to George Donoghue, an engineer and businessman. Donoghue would provide the capital while Caldwell would provide the architectural experience, which in fact he didn't have.
For about two years Caldwell earned a meager living with small buildings and landscape projects before admitting to himself that he had to learn something. So he approached Jens Jensen, a Danish immigrant who had worked as a garden designer for various parks commissions.
Effectively the founder of the 'Prairie style' of gardening, Jensen had opened a private practice in Ravinia, where Caldwell asked him for a job.
'I didn't know anything. I was a phenomenal boy of 21 and I hated universities, ' Caldwell recalled.
'Are you any good?' Jensen asked him and launched into a lecture. Caldwell was asked to stay for lunch and afterward Jensen resumed the lecture until, as he was leaving for a speaking engagement, Jensen told Caldwell to report for work the next morning.
'I went out to my car and tears were running down my face,' Caldwell told me. 'At last I've found a real man!'
From Jensen, Caldwell learned that a landscape architect shouldn't compete with nature, but express its inherent beauty.
During the Depression, Jensen's commissions were few. But a politically connected friend got Caldwell appointed as the Chicago Park District's principal designer. The results were his masterpieces: the Lily Pool, Promontory Point on the south lakeshore, and a Japanese Garden in Jackson Park.
But his perfectionism was at times costly. Taking a civil service examination for promotion, he annotated his answers with his judgment that the exam didn't measure the job skills that were actually needed to perform the work. He flunked. On a second try, he passed.
In the 1930s, Mies van der Rohe, formerly the director of Germany's famed Bauhaus design school, offered a refresher course for architects at the Art Institute of Chicago. Students were asked to bring a sample of their work. Seeing Caldwell's, he made him his chief draftsman.
Appointed director of architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Mies took Caldwell with him. As Mies' English was marginal, Caldwell developed the curriculum. Mies went from one drafting table to the next, puffed on his omnipresent cigar, and said: 'Yah, try anuder vun.'
Caldwell's classroom performances were riveting.
'What do we build with?' Caldwell asked a student in a class I took in the 1950s.
'Brick … glass,' the student stammered. 'And steel.'
'No!' Caldwell thundered. 'We build with the heart and the head!' He threw a light jab at each.
He began a session on reinforced concrete by dictating the formula. As students scribbled in notebooks, Caldwell spoke slowly. He split syllables, as if reciting poetry. 'Take one part Port-land cement, two parts sand, three parts coarse ag-gregate and suf-ficient water to mix.'
He did that for each incoming class. He also took IIT students to Bristol, Wisconsin, where he was building a home, one slab of stone after another. He subscribed to the Bauhaus philosophy that architects must experience the building process, with their hands.
He worked with Mies on the buildings Mies designed for IIT. But in 1958, the university trustees decided that the architectural firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill would finish the campus. Caldwell resigned on the spot.
For 20 years, he taught at the universities of Virginia, Southern California and Kansas and spent summers at his home in Bristol.
Then IIT's architectural faculty, feeling the program needed rejuvenation, induced Caldwell to return.
Taking cognizance of Caldwell's age, the dean said he need not carry a full teaching load. 'I'm not here to loaf,' he responded.
Surprised to learn of Caldwell's return, I phoned him. ''How could I say no?' he told me. 'All but one of the faculty were my students!'
We met in his classroom, and it was like time stood still. 'No!' he told a student. 'We build with the heart and the head!'
When Caldwell died in 1998 at 95, he was still teaching at IIT.
Shortly, when renovations are complete, you'll be able to experience the indelible thrill I had on our visit to his beloved Lily Pool.