Pamela
Bannos has been digging to uncover the truth about Lincoln Park for the
last 15 months, but not by dredging in the soil, which would very
possibly reveal human remains, perhaps almost anywhere she put a
shovel. Bannos has been instead digging through Chicago’s archives to
piece together information on the Chicago City Cemetery, a 57-acre
graveyard that served the entire city and existed on the southern
portion of Lincoln Park before it became a park—or, depending on if you
believe a cemetery is still a cemetery, even without the headstones,
still exists. From her research, Bannos estimates that in the
cemetery’s some 20 years of operation, beginning in the mid-19th
century, more than 35,000 people were buried there, and approximately
12,000 bodies still remain, embedded in the ground that today holds
homes, a zoo, a conservatory—everything we know to be Lincoln Park.
“It
just scares me, which is why I hedge and say thousands,” says Bannos
about the possible number of human remains. The senior lecturer in art
theory and practice from Northwestern University is a photographer, but
with this project, she threw herself into historical research, studying
documents and city records so old, so untouched, they smelled of the
Chicago fire, she says. “I don’t really want to know what’s under
there. I’m interested in the idea, the possibility. I’m interested in
having people walk in the park and visualize what it may have been like
as a cemetery. I’m just trying to get you to think differently, which
is what an artist does.”
With a $10,000
grant from Northwestern, Bannos’ project “Hidden Truths: The Chicago
City Cemetery and Lincoln Park” involves six historical markers in the
park, on display until November 21, and a Web site with such depth it
could be studied for weeks.
Hiddentruths.northwestern.edu
is embedded with document scans, video, audio of interviews and a
one-hour podcast tour that people can download before visiting the
park. Bannos also took the names of the cemetery lot occupants and
created a catalogue, proceeding to plot out 600 by 80 feet of ground
from Wisconsin Street down to Menomonee Street and show who owned it by
piecing together bits of information. Even Bannos admits she goes crazy
thinking about how she meticulously compiled the data.
This
is the story of a long-forgotten cemetery, something the history books
have always known was there, but most residents have been oblivious to,
even while being cognizant of the last remaining above-ground vestige,
the Couch tomb, a 112-square-foot mausoleum at the southwest corner of
the park. Erected in 1858 for real estate tycoon Ira Couch, it’s
possibly the oldest structure still standing in the area hit by the
Chicago Fire, according to Bannos. But as much as her story is a
chronicle of a long-lost cemetery, it’s also a narrative on how stories
shift with time and the Chicago Tribune. Yes, the Tribune. Bannos’
project began when she noticed she could search the Tribune’s archives
back to 1852. Her last project had involved an in-depth, obsessive
study of a glass negative of a street scene in New York, in which she
found everything she could about the image, using the New York Times
archives. When Bannos found the Tribune had the same searchable
database, she started searching, plugging in all sorts of things about
which she’d always been curious.
“I
remembered coming off Lake Shore Drive, my dad driving, and me seeing
the Couch tomb there,” says Bannos, with a fixed smile of excitement
about her project. “At the time, it was wrapped in fencing, and there
were bushes and stuff around it, but you could still see it and read
the word ‘Couch.’ People didn’t seem that interested or curious. You
see it and you wonder, but then you don’t find the answer and go on to
something else. So I put random things in the Tribune search. I put in
‘Couch tomb.’ And all of the sudden I got all these articles.”
The
articles started in the 1850s, with references to the cemetery, and
then went to descriptions of the tomb being the last thing left. There
were then articles questioning why the tomb was there. Bannos then
entered the words “Lincoln Park” and “cemetery.”
“Every
time those words came up together, it’s because they accidentally found
a grave in Lincoln Park,” Bannos says. “And that article was like, ‘Why
are there these bones in Lincoln Park? I think it’s because it used to
be a cemetery.’ But it’s the same newspaper that was telling these
stories, and if you read the articles in order, you almost start to see
how they change. This person wrote this article five years after this
one, and maybe in that time they didn’t have the resources to go see
what someone else had written. But it’s like, do you read your own
newspaper?”
And the Tribune is still
relaying the evolving story. In early May, the paper reported that
workers had found human remains at a construction site at 1453 N.
Dearborn, raising the possibility that the area had once been part of
an old cemetery, a notion Bannos now calls fact. Weeks later, the paper
ran an article on her and her project, forever throwing her into the
archives she so laboriously studied.
The
irony of it for Bannos is that while photography has been her
expertise, she found not a single photograph of the park. The camera
was already invented, but she’s been unable to find any type of image. “The
closest I came to being able to see it was a photograph that was taken
the day after the Chicago Fire from the Water Tower, looking north, and
you can kind of tell where Lincoln Park is, and you can see that
everything is kind of obliterated in the landscape,” she says. “I’m
trying to build for you the photograph without showing you the image.”
The
city established the City Cemetery in 1843, just past the north edge,
North Avenue, and began selling lots and filling them south to north,
beginning at Wisconsin. But as the city rapidly grew, so did a movement
to bury bodies farther away, with a concern for sanitation, health and
being so close to the lake, the water table. Bannos found such words
used as “percolating” and references to graves being dug and the hole
being full of water even before the coffin was lowered. The entire area
actually encompassed four cemeteries—the City Cemetery, a Catholic
cemetery, a Jewish cemetery and Potter’s Field, the large anonymous
graveyard for the poor, where the baseball diamonds are now located.
The
terrain of the unplotted area was marsh-like—there was a slough that
ran through the grounds, exactly where the garden in front of the
Lincoln memorial is now. Bannos found documents describing a 20-foot
alley that ran along the cemetery, parallel to Green Bay Road, today’s
Clark Street. People could see the cemetery from Green Bay Road, and
there were three gates to enter—two along Green Bay and one at North
Avenue. Later people entered Lincoln Park from the south through the
cemetery. Bannos found an 1852 watercolor rendering of the mile-long
picket fence that surrounded the cemetery, which was six feet tall and
meant to keep pigs and cows out from the north.
“The
fence watercolor is my favorite image because it was the closest I came
to seeing a photographic depiction of the grounds,” Bannos says. “The
watercolor—and because it is in color—felt like I was really there when
I first saw it. It was almost magical the way I felt taken back to that
place and time. Maybe because it was the only graphic depiction I found
that wasn't a map. Also, it was so carefully and artistically rendered.
It made me think of the carpenter or the fence builder as an artist.
His name was Ellis Smalley, by the way.”
Most of what
imagery Bannos was able to visualize came from narratives she read that
were written just after the Chicago Fire, in 1871. By then the cemetery
was abandoned—no one had been buried there for about five years.
Starting in the early 1860s, Rosehill and Graceland cemeteries were
open, much farther outside the city. The city urged families to move
the graves of loved ones to another cemetery. Lincoln Park was already
established, and the city was working to landscape it above Webster
Street. As the fire charred the ground of the old cemetery, it hastened
erasing the signs of a graveyard the city no longer wanted.
“The
fire burned markers, a lot of which were wood apparently,” says Bannos.
“And the flames cracked and charred and broke marble headstones. So
what happened is when a stone got removed, you lose a body. If there’s
no marker, you don’t know what’s there. I’ve read all these narrative
accounts. People are talking about running from the flames and running
to the lake and running through the cemetery, and there are these
legendary accounts of people actually jumping into graves that had been
excavated to avoid the flames of the fire.”
On
her Web site, Bannos quotes the 1871 book The Great Conflagration by
James W. Sheehan and George P. Upton: “As a general thing surviving
friends, who had the means, long since removed the bodies of their
kindred; those who remained had been the husbands, wives and children
of the poor, but were none the less dear. These graves were marked with
wooden boards, upon which were painted or cut the initials of the dead,
and occasionally some beyond. In even one yard, the inscriptions were
in German. Even in these abandoned cities of the dead, hundreds would
spend the long summer afternoons trimming the sandy mounds,
straightening the loose boards, and bringing water from the lake to
refresh the parched plants and flowers which affection had planted upon
the graves.”
“It still looked like a
cemetery,” Bannos says. “There were still tombstones, and they would
have had Victorian fencing, iron fencing, around the different plots
because I read that the person who bid to disinter the bodies from
Potter’s Field, which didn’t happen until a year after the Chicago
Fire, in 1872, and in the bid, he said, ‘I will be removing the stones
and the iron fencing,’ so he’s describing the things that were there. I
may not have pictures, but reading these documents, I’m putting the
pictures together. It sounds like it was getting decrepit. The families
were responsible for upkeep. The southern part of the cemetery was the
oldest section, so by the time they decided they were going to make
this into a park, that being the oldest section, those were the most
forgotten.”
Because lots had been sold by
the city, families were also responsible for moving the buried remains.
The city took out ads in the newspaper, urging people to claim loved
ones in Potter’s Field or move remains in the plots to another
cemetery. It was costly, and while the city would cover some of the
cost, many just ended up being forgotten as the landscape changed.
“One
the best articles that I saw, the Tribune wrote a story, just a blurb,
that said, ‘We’re about to start removing the bodies from the Potter’s
Field.’ The headline says, ‘More than 10,000 Remain,’ which I think is
conservative anyhow. ‘We’ve got 10 gravediggers, who we’ve estimated
can each remove 20 bodies a day,’ and I’m thinking wow, that’s kind of
amazing. They are just guys and shovels. So I’m thinking, ok, doing the
arithmetic, I’m figuring that should take 500 days. Three weeks later,
the Tribune reports, ‘Within the next week, we’ll be finished removing
bodies from Potter’s Field.’ What? This is the year after the Chicago
Fire and people were thinking about living. For 20 years, people were
digging bodies out of the park.”
By 1874,
700 lots were still left unclaimed, and by 1875, 150 tombstones were
left in the park, according to Bannos. That year, the city took the
tombstones, along with the graves they were marking, and moved them to
a one-acre plot by today’s south field house and put a fence around it,
calling it the Cemetery in the Park. “Never mind the hundreds of graves
that weren’t marked anymore,” Bannos says. “Eight years later, they
cleared the stones. I found this article from 1903 that said an
engineer in the park district found a map in a pigeonhole in his desk,
a chart that said where these 150 bodies were buried and people were
like, what 150 bodies?”
What happened to
those 150 tombstones? Bannos believes she found the answer. It’s her
“unsubstantiated theory” that they’re part of a wall at Graceland
Cemetery, one that looks different from all the rest and is composed of
headstone-like stones, charred, possibly from the Fire, and even
inscribed, like one reading, “asleep in Jesus.”
The
last record Bannos found of a body being removed from Lincoln Park was
from 1887, but remains have been found since, usually making their way
down to Springfield to be held in historical archives. Bannos found 10
reports of bones being found in the park, along with nine findings in
the residential area where the Catholic cemetery used to be. Because
most people were buried in wooden coffins and weren’t embalmed, little
is left except fragments of bone. Lester Fisher, former Lincoln Park
Zoo director, told Bannos that while digging the foundation for the
zoo’s barn in 1962, workers uncovered a skeleton and a casket, and
after getting no answer regarding what to do with it, it was reburied
and the foundation poured on top. In 1998, in the midst of the
construction of the parking garage in Lincoln Park, the remains of 81
people were found, along with one iron coffin, an expensive but popular
casket in the 19th century. The iron coffin perfectly preserved the
contained body as it was airtight, but the coffin was sheared during
construction, immediately beginning to decompose the body, releasing a
putrid odor. After much bureaucracy, the archeologist ended up buying a
new coffin and a cemetery plot for the iron casket and long-deceased
occupant.
After months of 16-hour days
researching and working on her project, Bannos is in the midst of
writing a book, furthering her process of storytelling. “It’s the story
of the story and how history gets written, wrongly or inaccurately,”
she says. “And I’m writing it again, and now I’m part of the story.”