One day in the 1970s, when Pamela Bannos was a teenager, she was riding in the back of her father’s car as he turned off Lake Shore Drive onto LaSalle Street. Looking out the window, she noticed an old stone structure standing in Lincoln Park. Surrounded by a chain-link fence and a wall of weeds, it looked like it might be a tomb. The word couch was just visible on its crest. What is that? she wondered. And if it is a tomb, what’s it doing in the park?
Intrigued by the way the story seemed to change each time it was told, Bannos began searching for articles about the cemetery itself. It didn’t take her long to notice something else that was strange. Although history books suggest all the graves were moved out in the 1860s, bones have turned up since then, both in Lincoln Park and in an adjacent area where the Catholic cemetery was located. The question of what actually happened to the bodies became an obsession for Bannos, who’s explored it in a multimedia art project called Hidden Truths, opening this week in the park.
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“It’s really fascinating,” says Julia Bachrach, the Park District’s historian. “There’s never really been a reason for me to go into the early history. She was focusing on the cemetery. I’ve always focused on the parks.”
Then came the Great Chicago Fire, sweeping through what remained of the cemetery on October 9, 1871, and destroying many markers. (As she delved into the history of the Chicago City Cemetery, Bannos found herself sniffing old property records and council minutes, convinced that she could smell the fire on them.) Afterward officials removed the remaining headstones and vaults—except for the Couch tomb. Bannos now believes that tomb stayed where it was because the park commission couldn’t afford the $3,000 it would’ve cost to move it.
Based on the records she examined, Bannos tallied 35,000 people buried in the City Cemetery and the Catholic cemetery, which was on the other side of North Avenue between Dearborn and Astor, extending south to Schiller. After counting the bodies moved to Graceland and estimating the number moved to other cemeteries, she calculated that no more than 22,500 bodies were taken out of the Lincoln Park graveyards. That leaves more than 12,000 unaccounted for.
Former Lincoln Park Zoo director Lester Fisher told Bannos that workers found a skeleton and casket when they dug the foundation for the zoo’s barn in 1962. After getting no guidance from bureaucrats on what to do, they reburied the casket and poured the foundation on top of it, Fisher told Bannos. (A recording of the interview will be on her Web site.)
Thu 5/22-Fri 11/21, Lincoln Park near North and Dearborn, hiddentruths.northwestern.edu. F
