22 Facts About Millennium Park

Millennium Park is a public park located in the Loop community area of Chicago, operated by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

In 2017, Millennium Park was the top tourist destination in Chicago and in the Midwest, and placed among the top ten in the United States with 25 million annual visitors.

Millennium Park has free admission, and features the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Cloud Gate, the Crown Fountain, the Lurie Garden, and various other attractions.

Community around Millennium Park has become one of the most fashionable and desired residential addresses in Chicago.

In 2006, Forbes named the park's 60602 zip code as the hottest in terms of price appreciation in the country, with upscale buildings such as The Heritage at Millennium Park leading the way for other buildings, such as Waterview Tower, The Legacy and Joffrey Tower.

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Millennium Park is successful as a public art venue in part due to the grand scale of each piece and the open spaces for display.

Millennium Park is considered one of the largest green roofs in the world, having been constructed on top of a railroad yard and large parking garages.

Centerpiece of Millennium Park is the Jay Pritzker Pavilion, a bandshell designed by Frank Gehry.

The Pritzker Pavilion is Grant Millennium Park's outdoor performing arts venue for small events, and complements Petrillo Music Shell, the park's older and larger bandshell.

The pavilion and Millennium Park have received favorable recognition by critics, especially for their accessibility; an accessibility award ceremony held at the pavilion in 2005 described it as "one of the most accessible parks—not just in the United States but possibly the world".

One of the most financially successful restaurants in Chicago, the Millennium Park Grill remains exempt from property taxes after a multi-year litigation which reached the appellate courts in Illinois.

The theater, which is largely underground due to Grant Millennium Park-related height restrictions, was named for its primary benefactors, Joan and Irving Harris.

Boeing Galleries are a pair of outdoor exhibition spaces within Millennium Park; they are located along the south and north mid-level terraces, above and east of Wrigley Square and the Crown Fountain.

Millennium Park has been featured in several films and television shows.

Aaron Montgomery Ward, who is known both as the inventor of mail order and the protector of Grant Millennium Park, twice sued the city of Chicago to force it to remove buildings and structures from Grant Millennium Park and to keep it from building new ones.

Millennium Park project has been the subject of some criticism since its inception.

Timothy Gilfoyle, author of Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark, notes that a controversy surrounds the corporate naming of several of the park's features, including the BP Bridge, named for an oil company.

When Millennium Park first opened in 2004, Metra police stopped a Columbia College Chicago journalism student working on a photography project, and confiscated his film because of fears of terrorism.

Almost all of Millennium Park was closed for a day for corporate events in 2005 and 2006.

Financial Times describes Millennium Park as "an extraordinary public park that is set to create new iconic images of the city", and further notes that it is "a genuinely 21st-century interactive park [that] could trigger a new way of thinking about public outdoor spaces".

Millennium Park was designed to be accessible; it only needs a single wheelchair lift and its accessibility won its project director the 2005 Barrier-Free America Award.

In celebration of the 2018 Illinois Bicentennial, Millennium Park was selected as one of the Illinois 200 Great Places by the American Institute of Architects Illinois component and was recognized by USA Today Travel magazine, as one of AIA Illinois' selections for Illinois 25 Must See Places.