In the middle of Jackson Park on Chicago’s South Side, behind the Griffin Museum campus, lies one of the city’s calmest places: the Garden of the Phoenix, a Japanese garden on Wooded Island where a koi pond, stone lanterns and carefully placed pines invite you to slow down.
The garden’s story reaches back to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, when Jackson Park — laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux across 551 acres in Woodlawn — hosted the fair. The Japanese garden was created for that exposition, its pavilion modeled on the Ho-o-Do, the Phoenix Hall in Kyoto. The phoenix was a fitting symbol for a Chicago that had risen from the Great Fire of 1871.
Restored with Chicago’s sister city Osaka and renamed Garden of the Phoenix in 2013, the garden sits amid the park’s other green pleasures: Wooded Island itself, Bobolink Meadows, and the cherry blossom trees around the Columbia Basin that draw crowds each spring.
Best of all, it is free and open with the park. Bring a quiet hour, watch the koi, and let one of Chicago’s most storied landscapes work its gentle magic.
Photo: Steven Kevil / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0
