Artist JeeYeun Lee’s walking tours tell a very different story about Chicago and its lakefront
CHICAGO — “What we are going to do is go for a walk.”
JeeYeun Lee, artist, activist, creator of social-justice-minded walking tours along Lake Michigan, stood in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art holding a microphone. Its cord curled over the concrete and ended at a small portable speaker at her feet. She waved a pamphlet. “Everyone should have one of these,” she said. “If you look at the map on the cover, that’s from 1902.” It showed where the shoreline of Lake Michigan used to be. It used to be where Lee stood now.
She pointed east.
“Everything between here to the lake is actually landfill,” she said. Several of the three dozen or so people seated on the MCA stairs nodded. Yes, they’d heard this was all landfill. That’s part of the narrative Chicago likes to tell about itself: After the Great Fire of 1871, there was so much debris clogging the streets, the city, in a fit of cleverness, used its rubble to
