Of Chicago’s 334 landmarks, the “best” is the Stephen A. Douglas Memorial. The spot is a well-maintained park where 35th Street dead-ends. The memorial monument itself is on a scale that you would expect to see in DC, but both the memorial and the man have largely been forgotten. Douglas was an important player in Abraham Lincoln’s political career, the foil to Lincoln’s view that slavery was a moral issue. Their rivalry would foreshadow the racial tensions to come in Chicago, and Douglas’ estate became a notorious POW camp during the Civil War.
