4001 N. Clark Street at Irving Park Road
Admission free.
Gates open at 8am and close at 4:30pm
For architects and historians, going to Graceland is a little
like being invited to a really great party with lots of
celebrities. Actually, it’s a lot like that, except that there
are no cocktails and the celebrities are all dead.
Founded in 1860, Graceland Cemetery is the final resting
place for virtually all of Chicago’s early leaders. Among its
monuments and mausoleums are works by her greatest artists and
architects, many of whom are also interred here. Its pleasant
park-like configuration and native plantings are the legacy of
landscape architect Ossian Simonds, a founding member of
Holabird, Simons and Roche who subsequently served as cemetery
superintendent for forty years.
Marvelous examples of changing taste in art and fashion are
literally cut in stone in Graceland’s confines. From Egyptian
obelisks and pyramids to classical temples and Arcadian ruins,
an American enthusiasm for the eccentric and extreme is on
display alongside examples of our more famous Puritan restraint.
Sculptor Daniel Chester French designed the monument titled “Memory”
for Marshall Field’s tomb; Lorado Taft’s “Silence” marks
pioneer Chicagoan Dexter Graves’ site. Louis Sullivan’s tomb
for the Getty family is justly celebrated, his characteristic
fecundity of ornament balanced with classical proportions that
presage Modernism.
Sullivan himself lies here, with colleagues and peers John
Root, Daniel Burnham, and the later Titan, Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, while a modest stone marks the grave of structural
engineer Fazlur Khan, whose genius made the Sears and Hancock
Towers possible. Commercial and industrial powers are
represented by George Pullman, Philip Armour, Marshall Field and
Cyrus McCormick. They join Richard Nickle, a photographer and
dogged champion of architectural preservation who was killed in
an accident in 1972 while documenting the demolition of Adler
and Sullivan’s 1894 Chicago Stock Exchange Building. Here,
too, is the nineteenth-century grave of John Jones, a
self-educated tailor who became, as two-time county
commissioner, the first black man to hold elected office in Cook
County. Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist John
McCutcheon, Bauhaus alumnus Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, and the
poetically yclept Cunegunda Bilowitz all lie here with others
who may have special significance, perhaps, only for you.
It’s important to remember that Graceland is a cemetery,
not an amusement park, and your respectful behavior will be
appreciated by fellow visitors. In winter, the cemetery is
particularly beautiful, but names and dates for many of the dead
may be obscured by snow.
An informative and sprightly guide, “A Walk Through
Graceland,” is available at the Chicago Architecture
Foundation bookstore at 224 South Michigan Avenue.
Still photography is permitted; no video/camcorders may be
used.
