Jackson Park

Park on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, 10 km/6 mi south-southeast of the ‘Loop’ (the city's central business district). Jackson Park is the southernmost of a series of parks fronting on Lake Michigan that includes Grant Park and Burnham Park. With its lagoons and various public facilities, it is an important recreational resource.

In 1893, Jackson Park was the site of the ‘White City’, a collection of neoclassical and Beaux-Arts buildings and gardens erected for the World's Columbian Exposition. Laid out to an overall design by Frederick Law Olmsted (creator of New York's Central Park), this exhibition brought together many of the most prominent architects and artists in the USA, whose monumental creations were later to inspire the ‘City Beautiful’ movement. Exposition buildings and exhibits extended west along the Midway Plaisance, which links Jackson Park with Washington Park inland. Nowadays, a few reminders of the exposition still remain in Jackson Park, though many of its structures were dismantled and reassembled elsewhere. The University of Chicago, in Hyde Park, lies just to the west, and there are a number of middle-class Black neighbourhoods to the south.