The hundreds of stone carvings at Morgan Shoal, between 45th and 50th Street in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, are in imminent danger of being lost. This section of lakefront is in terrible condition, with the many of the old rocks topsy turvy and falling into the lake. The city is following up emergency measures to reduce flooding with an initiative to fund its framework plan for complete reconstruction. The plan has appealing elements, including creation of additional parkland. However, it makes no reference to the carvings or their preservation, which is no surprise considering that public awareness of this artwork
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Promontory Point Stone Carvings Again Threatened
In the early 2000s the Hyde Park community succeeded (with then-Senator Obama’s help) in blocking a government plan to strip away the quarried step stones around Chicago’s Promontory Point and replace them with a new concrete-and-steel revetment. That important act of preservation incidentally saved the many stone carvings that reside on those blocks — several dozen of the thousands of the carvings that line Chicago’s waterfront. The concrete-and-steel approach to shoreline reconstruction was nonetheless applied from just north of Promontory Point up to Montrose Harbor. The “shoreline protection project” demolished several miles worth of the old step stones along with
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