Inspired by this unusually snowy Chicago winter, I recently set out to cross-country ski the entire 18.5 mile Lakefront Trail from north to south, unclipping and hiking where necessary, and stopping to check out public art and other sights along the way whenever I felt like it.
After skirting Montrose Beach and heading west past the harbor, I turn south to take the snow-covered gravel road that leads along the shore towards the Waveland Clock Tower. When the road reaches the Bill Jarvis Migratory Bird Sanctuary, I travel west to the Lakefront Trail to get around Belmont Harbor.
And A Signal of Peace, sculpted in 1890 by Cyrus E. Dallin, which depicts a man on horseback with a feathered headdress and upraised staff, was donated to the city by arts patron Lambert Tree with an explicitly anti-racist intent. He wrote that the monument was a tribute to Native Americans who had been “oppressed and robbed by government agents, deprived of their lands . . . shot down by soldiery in wars fomented for the purpose of plundering and destroying their race, and finally drowned by the ever westward tide of population.”
The notorious Oak Street curve, where high waves have nearly dragged many trail users into Lake Michigan, is a different story. But the lake is pretty much frozen here today, or at least totally still, so the only issue is navigating the ice boulders that litter the shoreline.
The Chicago Monument Project has identified all five statues of Lincoln on park district property or the public way as potentially problematic. That’s largely due to reassurances Lincoln gave white voters during the debates that, while he opposed slavery, he didn’t support equal rights for Black people. His position later evolved, thanks in part to lobbying by abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Ironically, unlike the statues of the Great Emancipator, there’s little chance of this massive monument to slavery apologist Stephen Douglas being removed, since it’s on a state-controlled historic site.
Not long afterwards I arrive at the South Shore Cultural Center, my finish line. It’s an imposing structure, built as a country club in the early 1900s, with a design partly inspired by an old club in Mexico City. Early members included retail tycoons Marshall Field and Montgomery Ward. African Americans and Jews were barred from membership in the private club up until the 1970s, when it went out of business rather than integrate. The park district bought the property, turning it into a highly inclusive community center.
