In 1919, Chicago architects Holabird & Roche won a design competition to build an all-purpose public arena for the south end of Grant Park. Opened in 1924, the Grant Park Municipal Stadium was soon renamed Soldier Field to honor lives lost in World War I. While best known today as home of the Chicago Bears, Soldier Field has only hosted the football team since 1971. Before that, the stadium was the venue for events as varied as college and high school football games; boxing bouts; addresses by luminaries like Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; religious gatherings; the first Special Olympics in 1968; and many others including car races, dog shows, music concerts, World Cup soccer, and ski jumping competitions. The facility had its largest attendance in 1954 when more than 250,000 people gathered to celebrate the Catholic Marian Year. Today, 100 years after it first opened, Soldier Field remains one of Chicago’s premier spaces for community gathering.
We celebrate this long history with a new digital collection that includes drawings and photographs from our Chicago Park District collections. See the detailed construction of Soldier Field, as well as a selection of events from its past. Highlights include images from Special Olympics events and scenes of the 1966 Chicago Freedom Movement Rally.
If you want to learn more about Soldier Field or the Chicago Park District, make an appointment to visit Special Collections.
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