Buckingham Fountain

Standing at the center of Grant Park, between Queen’s Landing and the end of Ida B. Wells Drive, Buckingham Fountain has long been described as Chicago’s front door. It is one of the largest fountains in the world, and its tiered silhouette reads instantly as a piece of borrowed European grandeur set down on the Lake Michigan shore.

A Versailles Lineage

The design is openly indebted to France. Built in a rococo wedding-cake style, the fountain was inspired by the Bassin de Latone and modeled after the Latona Fountain at the Palace of Versailles. The beaux arts architect Edward H. Bennett translated that royal precedent into a civic monument, while the French sculptor Marcel F. Loyau created the statuary. The result is a stepped composition of nested basins, each smaller than the one below, rising toward a central jet.

Composition. The bottom pool is 280 feet in diameter, the lower basin 103 feet, the middle basin 60 feet, and the upper basin 24 feet across. The lip of that upper basin sits 25 feet above the water in the lower basin, giving the structure its tapering, cake-like ascent. The whole work is executed in Georgia pink marble, lending the cold geometry a warm, rose-tinted surface.

The Seahorses and Their Meaning

The fountain is an allegory of Lake Michigan. Four sets of sea horses, two to a set, encircle the basins and symbolize the four states that border the lake: Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana. The sculpture thus binds the European form to a distinctly Midwestern subject.

Water as Spectacle

Buckingham Fountain holds 1.5 million U.S. gallons of water. During a display, more than 14,000 gallons per minute are pushed through its 193 jets, and the center jet shoots vertically to 150 feet. Water shows run hourly and last 20 minutes; after dusk they are choreographed with lights and music, the last beginning at 10:00 p.m. The pumps are governed by a Honeywell computer, once housed in Atlanta and relocated to the fountain’s pump house in the 1994 renovation.

History

The fountain was donated to the city by Kate Sturges Buckingham in memory of her brother, Clarence Buckingham, and constructed at a cost of $750,000; its official name is the Clarence Buckingham Memorial Fountain. Dedicated on August 26, 1927, it has since undergone a $2.8 million restoration in 1994 and a further multi-phase modernization begun in 2008.