Pulaski Park Fieldhouse, which resembles a grandly-scaled Eastern European meeting hall, has received preliminary Chicago Landmark designation from the Commission on Chicago Landmarks. Named for General Casimir Pulaski, a Polish-born Revolutionary War hero, the park is located on the Near Northwest Side, a block north and two blocks west of the busy Milwaukee-Division-Ashland intersection.
When it opened in 1914, the Pulaski Park Fieldhouse was the largest erected by the West Park Commission, and was one of Chicago's most elaborate park buildings. The fieldhouse is handsomely constructed of warm-colored, light brown brick with dark brown wood trim. Its interior spaces include a barrel-vaulted auditorium with lunette windows and a round-arched proscenium ornamented with an allegorical Classical mural.
The fieldhouse is the work of William Carbys Zimmerman, who in 1907 became the architect for the West Parks Commission. Along with landscape architect Jens Jensen, the pair created innovative neighborhood parks and renovated large West Side parks with Prairie-style landscapes and buildings.
At the time, Chicago's great pastoral parks were located at some distance from most of the city's working-class neighborhoods. By the early 1900s, social reformers were advocating a new kind of park, attuned to the specific needs of Chicago's largely immigrant working class, for whom existing large parks were inaccessible.
The Pulaski Park Fieldhouse reflects changing cultural attitudes towards the role of parks in Chicago in the early 20th Century from pastoral settings, devoted to passive recreations, to landscapes more inventively programmed with recreational and social uses accommodated by the fieldhouses.
The vote for preliminary landmark status begins the process and a full vote by the City Council is needed for landmark designation.
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