Along the shoreline that runs past La Rabida Hospital at 65th Street and Lake Michigan there is an exquisite collection of rock carvings from the 20th century. Or I should say once exquisite, as they have taken a beating from the lake and the weather in recent years.
Those carvings are on limestone blocks that once formed a revetment protecting park and beach from the lake. The beach is gone as is most of the revetment’s structural integrity. Where it isn’t now a pile of rocks, it’s a line of large blocks now mostly under water.
This area, where carving began in the 1930s, includes some of the finest carved rocks along the lake. There is the one I call the Peace Rock north of the hospital and a nearby compass beautifully rendered in stone. The compass, however, is on a rock that has already started sliding into the lake, and more are sure to follow absent some kind of human intervention.
This area is within the scope of government planning for lakefront reconstruction, but the track record of those efforts does not bode well for the carvings. Thousands were lost when the blocks that hosted them were ripped up and replaced with concrete and steel at several sites along the lake in the early 2000s. Any plan for work at La Rabida needs to take account of the carvings, nearly 1,200 in all, including those on another group of rocks more or less behind the hospital and many more a little farther south.
This third group of carvings, past a stretch of rubble, lies along one of the only sections of natural lakeshore in the city. Just offshore of that bit of bedrock is a line of protective limestone blocks whose carvings include the most elaborate one anywhere along Chicago’s lakefront. That’s a carving with 12 separate panels created in the late 1940s and early 1950s and featuring a number of messages and figures. (You’ll have to scroll most of the way down the gallery to see that one.) This carving, along with others in this section, is barely above the waterline. Many of the carvings here are fully under water during period of high lake levels.
La Rabida Carvings – Just North of the Hospital
La Rabida Carvings – Behind the Hospital
La Rabida Carvings – South of the Hospital (north to south)
Find lakefront carvings by location.