4001 N. Clark Street at Irving Park Road
Admission free. 
Gates open at 8am and close at 4:30pm

For architects and historians, going to Graceland is a little like being invited to a really great party with lots of celebrities. Actually, it’s a lot like that, except that there are no cocktails and the celebrities are all dead.

Founded in 1860, Graceland Cemetery is the final resting place for virtually all of Chicago’s early leaders. Among its monuments and mausoleums are works by her greatest artists and architects, many of whom are also interred here. Its pleasant park-like configuration and native plantings are the legacy of landscape architect Ossian Simonds, a founding member of Holabird, Simons and Roche who subsequently served as cemetery superintendent for forty years.

Marvelous examples of changing taste in art and fashion are literally cut in stone in Graceland’s confines. From Egyptian obelisks and pyramids to classical temples and Arcadian ruins, an American enthusiasm for the eccentric and extreme is on display alongside examples of our more famous Puritan restraint. Sculptor Daniel Chester French designed the monument titled “Memory” for Marshall Field’s tomb; Lorado Taft’s “Silence” marks pioneer Chicagoan Dexter Graves’ site. Louis Sullivan’s tomb for the Getty family is justly celebrated, his characteristic fecundity of ornament balanced with classical proportions that presage Modernism.

Sullivan himself lies here, with colleagues and peers John Root, Daniel Burnham, and the later Titan, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, while a modest stone marks the grave of structural engineer Fazlur Khan, whose genius made the Sears and Hancock Towers possible. Commercial and industrial powers are represented by George Pullman, Philip Armour, Marshall Field and Cyrus McCormick. They join Richard Nickle, a photographer and dogged champion of architectural preservation who was killed in an accident in 1972 while documenting the demolition of Adler and Sullivan’s 1894 Chicago Stock Exchange Building. Here, too, is the nineteenth-century grave of John Jones, a self-educated tailor who became, as two-time county commissioner, the first black man to hold elected office in Cook County. Pulitzer Prize-winning political cartoonist John McCutcheon, Bauhaus alumnus Lazlo Maholy-Nagy, and the poetically yclept Cunegunda Bilowitz all lie here with others who may have special significance, perhaps, only for you.

It’s important to remember that Graceland is a cemetery, not an amusement park, and your respectful behavior will be appreciated by fellow visitors. In winter, the cemetery is particularly beautiful, but names and dates for many of the dead may be obscured by snow.

An informative and sprightly guide, “A Walk Through Graceland,” is available at the Chicago Architecture Foundation bookstore at 224 South Michigan Avenue.

Still photography is permitted; no video/camcorders may be used.