Millennium Park under construction. Bonus: You can see Lakeshore East is still just a giant mud puddle in the background. It would sprout 7½ skyscrapers, a supermarket, a park and a school over the next ten years.
Millennium Park recently turned ten years old. In spite of what anyone might think about the price tag, the location, the target audience, or the (alleged!) corruption involved, it’s hard to deny that the park is a success. It’s become a focal point for the city’s tourist industry, and a symbol of the city on everything from tote bags to web site logos around the world.
While Millennium Park is ten-years-old, this blog is older. In fact, as far as we know, Gapers Block is the only Chicago blog that’s been publishing longer than we have (by seven months).
Since this blog is downright elderly in internet terms, we put on our trifocals, fumbled for our Hurry-cane, and dug through the dusty trunks in the basement to find photographs of Millennium Park when it was still just a young whippersnapper under construction. Enjoy.
If you were to hull The Bean, this is what you would find underneath.
Working on the gardens in front of the Pritzker Pavilion.
Assembling the Harris Theater
Traffic had to snake around the serpentine BP Pedestrian Bridge for a while.
Note that you can still see the seams in the grid of panels that make up the titanium fascinators at the Pritzker Pavilion
The beloved Bean before it was buffed smooth. From this angle, the grid of seams make it look like a giant globe.
The floor is still a work in progress around Cloud Gate
Millennium Park under construction.
