Fountain of Time

The story

In 1913, Chicago's Benjamin Ferguson Monument Fund commissioned Lorado Taft to mark 100 years of peace between the United States and Britain following the Treaty of Ghent. What he unveiled in 1922 was far stranger than a standard civic monument: a 126-foot-long wave of 100 hooded, grimacing human figures rushing toward death, watched over by a 16-foot hooded Father Time carrying a scythe from across a water basin. Taft took his concept from poet Henry Austin Dobson’s couplet—"Time goes, you say? Ah, no! / Alas, Time stays; we go"—and poured the entire existential scene using 250 tons of aggregate concrete across 4,500 separate molds.

Because budget limits prevented him from carving granite or marble, Taft and engineer John J. Earley had to pioneer hollow cast-concrete construction. The finished structure is entirely hollow inside, featuring a knee-high access hatch near the base that conservators still crawl through to inspect its innards. Taft also snuck a personal easter egg into the work: if you walk around to the western back of the march, you'll find Taft sculpted his own bowed, smock-wearing likeness directly into the crowd of figures. His grand vision was even broader—he envisioned turning the entire Midway Plaisance into an aquatic canal system anchored at the far east end by a twin monument called the Fountain of Creation, though the city never gave him the money to build it.

Decades of harsh Chicago winters eventually wrecked the plumbing, leaving the reflecting pool bone-dry for over fifty years while the concrete figures eroded in a empty ditch. A massive multi-year restoration effort finally refilled the basin in 2005, giving Father Time his reflection back after half a century of staring into dry concrete.