www.wbez.org14%
Jackson Park Bathing Pavilion at 63rd Street Beach: What's That Building? 2%
By Dennis Rodkin2%
7/13/2026, 10:00:00 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 10 faulty reasoning types, including False Dilemma, Hasty Generalization, and Framing Effect, with Quote-first Misdirection as the most egregious example at 5.8% saturation with 81 hits. Analysis detected 321 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,393 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 11.5% and a BS Rank of 2% (15,410 of 15,673 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 98.30% of the article peer group.
This monumental building, with its two towers and long open-air promenades on the lower and upper levels, is a century-old symbol of Chicago’s love for its beaches.
The grand scale of the building and the romance of its arches and inner courtyards aren’t just picturesque.
They create a spectacular gateway onto a broad, beautiful beach loved and crowded for generations, even before this structure was built as an anchor in 1919.
It’s a glorious spot, with restored natural dunes along one edge of the beach, a fountain and a fantastic view of the lake.
And like so many Chicago beaches, particularly those on the South Side, an integral piece of the story has to do with the city’s deep history of segregation.
The fountain in the pavilion’s courtyard.
K’Von Jackson for WBEZ
The beach at 63rd is the eastern end of what may be Chicago’s greatest greenspace, the chain of parks that make up Jackson Park, the Midway and Washington Park.
The earliest notion of bringing Chicagoans to the lake at this spot happened in 1871, when Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux laid out a plan for the chain of three parks on more than 1,000 marshy acres.
A series of lagoons would wind from the southwestern corner of Washington Park, about 2.7 miles to the outlet to Lake Michigan just south of where this pavilion now stands.
A pier would have extended into the water about where a breakwater sits now.
But instead what got built there was far more exciting: a 1/2-mile pier topped by the world’s first moving sidewalk .
It was designed by Joseph Lyman Silsbee to carry people and their luggage to steamships docked nearby and became a sensation for fair visitors at five cents per ride.
Also on this site, parallel to the lake, sat the peristyle, a domed structure with many columns and sculptures along its length.
These were some of the first parts of the fair to be lost, destroyed by fire in January 1894.
During the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the area that includes this present-day parking lot was the site of a moving sidewalk.
K’Von Jackson for WBEZ
It would be 25 years before the present bathing pavilion was built in their place, though a pavilion was built nearby in the 1890s.
In the meantime, the popular beach on this part of the shoreline was at 57th Street, anchored by another ornate building from the fair, the German building, lavishly ornamented with eagles and floral garlands in the plaster leading up its 150-foot tower.
That building, just east of what's now the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, burned down in 1925 and the beach there is without such a fanciful feature.
In 1917, the South Park Commission, one of the city’s several park districts at the time, said the new bathing pavilion at 63rd Street Beach would go up at a cost of $167,000, or about $4.34 million in today’s dollars.
It was to be the South Side counterpart to one completed in 1916 at what’s now Clarendon Park on the North Side.
Somewhat similar in design, with two towers and an open-air promenade on the second floor, the Clarendon Park Municipal Bathing Beach building eventually changed roles, when lakefill expanding the park to its east obliterated the beach, and it’s been renovated so many times that its likeness to this one is gone.
For 63rd Street, the design was a mix of classical revival (the palatial arches and towers) with Chicago-born Prairie Style (the horizontality of the arms and the overhanging roofs).
It wouldn’t be as ornate as the old World’s Fair peristyle that stood nearby, because of the modern, low-cost, fast-construction material the South Park Commission chose, an aggregate concrete known as “popcorn concrete” or “marblecrete.”
It was meant to give the walls texture, unlike flat concrete, but it meant ornamental details couldn’t be intricate .
The building design is a mix of classical revival and Chicago-born Prairie Style.
K’Von Jackson for WBEZ
The building and beach were a hit.
In July 1925, the Chicago Tribune ran crowd estimates for the city's beaches on a recent hot day.
Of 240,000 people who had gone to the beach on Sunday, July 12, Jackson Park’s beach had the most at 100,000.
Next was Oak Street Beach with 65,000.
The beach became known for water carnivals, the final round of the citywide sand castle building contest, an outdoor club’s hikes through the chain of parks and Girl Scout outings.
On one of those Girl Scout outings , by a troop of 23 Black girls in 1929, several white people reportedly threw rocks.
It was the second time that August weekend Black beachgoers were greeted with hostility by white people.
At that very time the city was marking a decade since the fiery race riots of 1919 sparked by racial hostility on a South Side beach.
But for 63rd Street Beach, it was only the latest outburst of white territorial behavior.
In August 1915, a young Black man took a 63rd Street Beach lifeguard to court , claiming they had dunked him until he almost drowned and telling him that by being there he was polluting the water.
Around the same time the next summer two more racial flareups were reported — and it’s worth noting that at the same time, another happened in north suburban Glencoe.
The Chicago Defender, Chicago’s Black newspaper, reminded its readers “it must be borne in mind that our people pay taxes for use of the beaches.”
That included not just the unofficial Black beach at 29th Street but also the unofficial white beach at 63rd.
In 1929, the Chicago Tribune ran an editorial saying that while Negroes, as it called them, clearly had the legal right to be on any city beach, they should voluntarily stay off beaches claimed by white people.
Knowing “the presence of a Negro, however well behaved, among white bathers is an irritation,” the editorial said, “it would seem that the Negroes could make a definite contribution to good race relationships by remaining away from the beaches where their presence is resented.”
At the same time, the parks commission should build high-quality facilities on the beaches from Roosevelt to Pershing Road, a 3-mile stretch of lakefront where white people didn’t object to Black people’s presence.
In other words, the Tribune called for separate but equal beaches, like the policy on schools that prevailed across the country from the 1890s until the U.S.Supreme Court struck it down in 1954.
The racial flareups continued throughout the 1930s , even with announcements by the parks commission that every Chicagoan had the right to use any beach.
It was only as the racial makeup of Woodlawn and other nearby neighborhoods shifted from mostly white to mostly Black that the tension dissipated.
By the 1990s, the bathing pavilion was rundown, with some inner reinforcing bars of the concrete sticking out after decades of wind had blasted away the surface, the Chicago Tribune reported.
Weeds had taken over the pretty breezeways and the original green tile roof had been replaced with cheap gray asphalt shingles.
“For South Siders, it was a bitter symbol of the way their lakefront was a poor cousin to Lincoln Park to the north,” the paper’s Blair Kamin wrote after a $6.2 million restoration brought back the building’s beauty.
The natural area at 63rd Street Beach help reduce sand erosion and provide habitat for dozens of bird species.
K’Von Jackson for WBEZ
The renovations were followed in the early 2000s by an ecological restoration of the dune area northwest of the bathing pavilion.
Among its other benefits, the dunes reduce sand erosion and provide habitat for dozens of bird species.
Bike and pedestrian tunnels reconnected 63rd Street Beach to the park it was cut off from by development of Leif Ericson Drive (later renamed Lake Shore Drive) in the 1920s.
All of those efforts turned this spot back into a lovely beachfront experience, a contemporary version of what Olmsted and Vaux first envisioned 155 years ago.
Dennis Rodkin is the residential real estate reporter for Crain’s Chicago Business and In the Loop’s “What’s That Building?”
contributor.
K’Von Jackson is the freelance photojournalist for In the Loop’s “What’s That Building?”
Follow him @true_chicago .
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