It’s mostly a mystery who created the rock carvings up and down Chicago’s Lake Michigan shore. But there are exceptions, most notably the life-size mermaid that now resides south of Oakwood Beach around 41st Street.
This accomplished but long-anonymous piece of stone carving eventually won recognition for its creators, with the Chicago Sun-Times unraveling its mystery in 2000.
She was originally carved a couple blocks north of her current location, in an out-of-the-way spot right on the shoreline at 39th Street. Out of the way was the point: “We were trespassing,” said one of her creators, Roman Villareal, a self-taught stone carver and painter.
He was spending time in the summer of 1986 with Jose Moreno, a stone carver visiting from Mexico. They had been selling their work at the 57th Street Art Fair in Hyde Park, he said, and “while we were there together, I kept telling him, hey man, let’s do something together while you’re here. You got time, I got time. We can go on the lakefront and that’s where the big rocks [are].”
“There’s no big rocks anywhere else that you could carve,” he explains. “The most you can get is what you can find from abandoned buildings, porches, windows, and so you’re limited to what you can get. But not the lakefront. It’s got some beautiful limestone.”
Why a mermaid? Moreno’s specialty, according to Villareal, was carving women, especially beautiful, naked women.
“But I tell him, you know what, let’s do — cuz I was already doing mermaids — let’s do a mermaid…. We had to figure out something no one would get mad at, politically, socially. Who could get mad at a mermaid?
“We worked there, I think it was for seven days. It was so much fun because we were on the lake, it was beautiful. It was comfortable. We were relaxed. We were in sculptor heaven.”
Villareal and Moreno share the major credit for the mermaid, assisted by two other artists, Alfred Arroyo, a self-taught painter, and Edfu Kingigna, a jeweler.
“Between me and [Moreno], we kind of split the work in half, me because I was trying to learn techniques from him. Him, he was learning from me the direct carving. We didn’t have a maquette.”
For years after its creation the mermaid was just as mysterious as all the other lakefront carvings, even though it was the largest and most sculptural of them all. Everyone queried about the piece’s origin in a December 2000 Chicago Sun-Times article threw up their hands.
“The city’s public art records have offered no clues… The carving is not listed in any archives,” the story reads. At that point it was still part of the old revetment, and at times partially submerged by a rising lake.
But then two things happened. First, Villareal’s daughter, who served as the model for the mermaid, saw the article and informed the newspaper about the sculpture’s origin, eventually leading to an item in People magazine about the “mystery mermaid.”
Then, before that reach of the lakefront was rebuilt and the old limestone revetment destroyed, the Chicago Park District decided the piece was worth saving.
Eventually, the mermaid was moved inland to Bessemer Park in the South Chicago neighborhood, and then back to the lakefront at Oakwood Beach, not far from where it was created. While it was displayed at Bessemer Park, Villareal worked with kids from a Park District summer program to enhance the piece, adding fish and waves to the block beneath the mermaid.
Villareal is still alive and actively making art, albeit not secretly. He’s also returned to the lakefront in recent years to carve and lead DIY workshops at Promontory Point for the Promontory Point Conservancy.
The Mermaid
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