ATDTDA (2): Lake Shore Drive [...] Oak Street (42.5)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Troth was long gone, remarried it seemed the minute the decree came down, and rumored now to be living on Lake Shore Drive someplace up north of Oak Street.  Some vice-president or something (p. 42).



http://www.aaccessmaps.com/show/map/chicago_dtown_mid
 

The Gold Coast

The Gold Coast is one of the most affluent neighborhoods in Chicago, consisting mostly of high-rise apartment buildings on Lake Shore Drive, facing Lake Michigan, but also including low-rise residential blocks inland. As with many neighborhoods, its exact borders are subject to dispute, but generally extend south to Oak and west to LaSalle, excluding the Carl Sandburg Village housing development between LaSalle, Dearborn, Division, and North (located in Old Town & built as a buffer to encroaching blight in the 1960's).

The Gold Coast was an unexceptional neighborhood until 1885, when Potter Palmer, former dry goods merchant and owner of the Palmer House hotel, built a fanciful castle on Lake Shore Drive. Over the next few decades, Chicago's elite gradually migrated from Prairie Avenue to their new home north of the Loop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_North_Side,_Chicago


The Gold Coast Neighborhood is one of Chicago’s most treasured residential areas with its quiet, tree-lined streets, stately homes and connections to the city’s past. First known as the Astor Street District, in the late 1800’s, it started at North Avenue and ran south along Astor to Division Street, then called Bishop’s Street. Today, the Astor Street District is within the larger neighborhood of the Gold Coast which extends from North Avenue south to Oak Street and from the lake as far west as Clark Street. [...]

http://www.goldcoastneighbors.org/master.html?http://www.goldcoastneighbors.org/neighborhood/history.html


See also:

http://www.emporis.com/en/wm/zo/?id=100009

http://chicagouncommon.com/photography/gallery/gold_coast/


Lake Shore Drive

[...] The Illinois Central proved a bad precedent for the development of parks along Chicago's lakefront. From 1890 to 1913, retail ogul Aaron Montgomery Ward went to court several times to prevent construction of various structures, from armories to a natural history museum, within the confines of Grant Park. In 1894, his pressure forced the City Council to turn over the Lake Park lands to the South Park Commission, which had been in charge of developing the World's Columbian Exhibition in Jackson Park and the adjacent parklands and set about developing the park. His actions also stopped cold Daniel Burnham's plans for a cultural campus in Grant Park; the museums planned for that site, including the Field Museum of Natural History and the Adler Planetarium, were eventually built on new fill east of the Illinois Central tracks and south of Twelfth Street.

The precedent for Lake Shore Drive was set in 1896, when the Commercial Club asked Daniel Burnham to present some schemes he had been working on for the south lakefront. The areas west of the IC tracks were terribly congested and crowded, despite the new parkways. Burnham planned to fill in vast lakefront areas and to create a network of lagoons, sheltered by offshore islands, along the city\u2019s entire lakefront. A scenic “Outer Park Boulevard” would connect north and south lakefronts, offering a pleasurable Sunday drive for the city's residents. The Commercial Club was so impressed by Burnham's scheme that they commissioned the famous Plan of Chicago, completed in 1909 and widely publicized ever since. Burnham centered the grand plan around the lakefront park and pleasure drive, writing 

“First in importance [to the city] is the shore of Lake Michigan. It should be treated as park space to the greatest possible extent. The lakefront by right belongs to the people… not a foot of its shores should be appropriated to the exclusion of the people.” [...]

http://foreverfreeandclear.org/?q=node/14

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Shore_Drive