Hidden History of Lincoln Park by Patrick Butler

Author:Patrick Butler [Butler, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2015-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

OLD VIKING SHIP GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN, AS FANS CONTINUE THEIR LONG SEARCH FOR ITS NEW HOME

Another very important Lincoln Park symbol—the Viking ship kept on display near the zoo’s duck pond from 1919 to 1998, when the Chicago Park District ordered it moved to make way for a major zoo expansion—was rowed here from Norway as part of the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

The seventy-six-foot-long exact replica of a Viking ship unearthed only a few years before Chicago’s World’s Fair made the 4,500-mile Atlantic crossing in twenty-eight days to show how Norsemen got to America at least five hundred years before Christopher Columbus. The twelve-man crew commanded by Captain Magnus Andersen, a Norwegian newspaper publisher and yachtsman, used only oars and sail, guided by a sextant, compass and barometer. The only time they were in any real danger was after landing in New York, when they were mobbed en route to a banquet in their honor by angry Italians who thought the latter-day Vikings were trying to discredit Columbus.

Chicago mayor Carter Harrison I took command of the ship when it arrived on July 12 at about the same time replicas of Columbus’s three ships were being towed from Spain because they weren’t seaworthy enough to make the trip on their own. One of those ships, moored off Lincoln Park in the early 1920s, was eventually lost through neglect. The other two were berthed on the South Side near what is today LaRabida Sanitarium. They, too, perished from neglect.

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