Humboldt Park

Humboldt Park. . Chicago's West Park Commission had just been created when residents began requesting that a park be named in honor of Baron Friedrich Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), a German scientist who popularized the notion of living with nature. Two years later, after designer William Le Baron Jenney (best known for his innovations in sky-scraper technology) finished his plans for three regional parks on the West Side, the northernmost one became Humboldt Park., In 1877, the first section of Humboldt Park was completed: the northeastern 80 of the park's 207 acres. The initial improvements included a grand entrance at the comer of California Avenue and Division Street (now gone), a perimeter drive, a lagoon, and two wooded islands. This area remains the only part of the park that embodies Jenney's ideas., The only significant additions in the next 15 years were monuments honoring von Humboldt, German novelist Fritz Reuter, and Viking explorer Leif Ericson, which were donated by neighborhood residents., The next major improvement (1896) was the construction of a Queen Anne-style stable, or Receptory, surrounded by a naturalistic landscape featuring a lily pond and footbridge. The landscape design was probably an early project of Jens Jensen, known today as the founder of Prairie-style landscape architecture., One of Jensen's most impressive later designs is also in Humboldt Park. After he was appointed chief landscape architect of the West Park Commission in 1905, Jensen extended Jenney's lagoon into a meandering "prairie river" by using hidden water sources to supply the two brooks that fed into the river and placing mursh plants along the banks of the entire waterway., He surrounded it with a wild flower garden, and also creased a formal rose garden. Among the architectural works he commissioned were a boat house, music shelter and several massive lanterns, all by the innovative Prairie-school architects, Schmidt, Garden and Martin in 1907, as well as a natatorium. Only the music shelter is no longer standing., In 1927, a major bond issue led to the constriction of several other buildings in the West Park System, including the Humboldt Park Fieldhouse, which were designed by the Chicago firm of Michaelsen and Rognstad, famous for their high quality, picturesque buildings. The last major building constructed in Humboldt Park was the Art Deco-style, Illinois National Guard Armory (1940).