Midway Plaisance - University of Chicago

University of Chicago

Following the Exposition, the Midway Plaisance was returned to a park setting, under the renewed plans of Frederick Law Olmsted. Over the ensuing decades, the Midway gradually came to be a part of the University of Chicago, which expanded in 1926 to be located on either side of it. Later designers and artists, including Lorado Taft, and Eero Saarinen added or sought to add their vision to the Midway. Statues of the father of modern taxonomy, Carolus Linnaeus, and an equestrian statue of the Knight of Blanik, a legendary Czech savior who emerges from Blanik mountain in his nation's hour of need by famed sculptor Albin Polasek, grace the Midway.

It has remained essentially a green area, a public resource subject to much speculation, and various periodic plans of redevelopment. The sunken panels, home now to soccer players and a new ice skating and sports facility, the cross-street "bridges," and the east-west lines of trees, pay homage to Olmsted's vision.

In 1999, a new master plan for the Midway Plaisance done by OLIN, a landscape architecture firm, was unveiled by the University of Chicago and the Chicago Park District.

The proximity of the Midway to the University gave the school's early football teams, the Maroons, a second nickname, "Monsters of the Midway", a name later applied to the Chicago Bears when the U of C dropped its football program.