The Huntley House was constructed on Grace Street near inner Lake Shore Drive in 1853. By the next year the house became a resort and then a hotel with two additions attached to it by its demise in 1890. Elisha Huntley owned property from Grace Street to Cornelia, lakefront to Broadway known at the time as the subdivision of Pine Grove. The house-hotel would be known as the Lake View Hotel. The founders of the township in 1857 would call land from Devon Avenue to Fullerton Avenue, lakefront to Western Avenue as the Township of Lake View (1857-1887) and then the City of Lake View (1887-1889). The two words ‘lake’ and ‘view’ would continue to stick when it became a neighborhood by 1930.
There is a triangular park-lot sized space that is owned by the City of Chicago. This space was once used as a ‘station house’ for public transit supervisors who once maintained public motor vehicle traffic on Sheridan Road in the early 20th century. This old station house park-lot sized space is located just north of Grace Street on Sheridan Road at the point where Sheridan Road turns west to Sheffield Avenue and then north again. This triangular space on Sheridan Road is called ‘Sheridan Triangle Garden’ and is approximately located near the old Huntley house-Lake View Hotel, the namesake of our neighborhood.
Sheridan Triangle Garden has been a garden space area since the 1980’s and is maintained by a small group of neighborhood gardeners as a not-for-profit organization.
I joined this small band of volunteer gardeners on August 1, 2013 to assist in the maintenance and improvement of the garden property not only as a gardener but as a local historian. My contribution would be to gain popular support and monies to create historical graphic ground markers within the garden space that indicated the neighborhood’s beginnings and maybe some of the Lake View’s forgotten past. The gardeners (me too) would like to protect the space by protecting the flowers and lawn with an ornate metal two foot fencing along the sidewalks that surround the triangular space so that folks can view the graphic markers along the sidewalks and beauty of the space within. We do have a section of the space devoted to dog walkers and we gardeners would like to improve on that space with financial support.
Simply, we need your support to maintain the memory of historical Lake View as well as maintaining the beauty of Sheridan Triangle Gardens.
I hope your join us in this effort!
Also, join LakeView Historical on Facebook!
