Aba Journal Podcasts - Legal Talk Network

Chicago's lakefront with its parks, museums, beaches and public spaces is an accident of history. But can we take lessons from that history to create sustainable and environmentally responsible public spaces? Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill look at the political, commercial and legal wrangling–some of which involved very strange bedfellows–that led to the development of lakefront land and its preservation for public use in their new book, Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago.   From the enigmatic Aaron Montgomery Ward, who amassed a massive fortune that funded his legal battles to keep the lake views from his flagship store, to the rapscallion "Captain" George Wellington Streeter, whose squad of armed squatters long held the land that now forms the neighborhood of Streeterville, Kearney and Merrill share the backstories of a number of the historical figures who helped make the Chicago lakefront what it is today. They also dig into one of the city's most ambitious engineering proj