Museum Campus

It encompasses five of the city's major attractions: the Adler Planetarium, America's first planetarium; the Shedd Aquarium; the Field Museum of Natural History; Soldier Field, home of the Chicago Bears of the National Football League; and the Lakeside Center of McCormick Place.

[1] Spanning from Roosevelt Road in the north to the terminus of the Stevenson Expressway at Lake Shore Drive in the south, the Museum Campus consists of the southeastern portion of Grant Park, the entirety of Northerly Island, and the northern portion of Burnham Park.

[2] The Museum Campus opened on June 4, 1998, after the northbound lanes of Lake Shore Drive had been moved west of Soldier Field in 1996, freeing up 36 acres of land.

The median of the drive itself is lined with a number of grand bronze monuments: a 1904 sculpture designed by Kazimierz Chodziński commemorating Thaddeus Kościuszko, relocated from Humboldt Park in 1978; a 1911 monument to Karel Havlíček Borovský relocated from Douglass Park in 1983; and a 1973 replica of a famous 19th-century statue in Warsaw, designed by Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, depicting Nicholas Copernicus.

However, these plans were canceled in June 2016 due to opposition from the Friends of the Parks advocacy group.