Category: Vernacular Art

The Foster Beach area is home to more than 600 rock carvings on the limestone blocks that line the shore. This page features a selection of the 200 or so carvings that run from the north end of Foster Beach to Osterman Beach at Hollywood Avenue, and the best of the about 400 carvings that start at the south end of Foster Beach and stretch a bit less than a mile to the Montrose Dog Beach. The carvings north of the beach are among the easiest to see along the Chicago waterfront. The concrete deck at the base of the

Montrose Harbor on Chicago’s North Side was once the site of a remarkable set of rock carvings on the limestone blocks that ran down in steps to the water. The large blocks were put in place when the harbor was built in the late 1930s, as they were in locations up and down the Chicago waterfront, and removed when the Montrose Harbor lakefront was rebuilt in the early 2000s. The remarkable carvings — dozens of them — were demolished along with the blocks that hosted them and are lost forever. At that time the lakefront carvings were virtually unknown in

The section of Chicago’s shoreline that abuts Morgan Shoal in Hyde Park is home to more than 1,100 rock carvings made over the last 90+ years by mostly anonymous creators. These include the city’s earliest dated carvings, back to 1930.  This stretch of shore, from around Hyde Park Boulevard to 45th Street, is also the most deteriorated, with the old limestone revetments that once protected the parkland in a state of disrepair or, in some places, disappearance.  But hundreds of carvings are still findable by the intrepid searcher, at least for now. The city has funded a major reconstruction of