Jackson Park's 'Golden Lady' Getting First Regilding Since the 1990s

The Statue of the Republic, the 24-foot bronze figure known to generations of South Siders as the "Golden Lady," is about to get its shine back.

Scaffolding went up around the statue in Jackson Park last week, and the Chicago Park District says work has started on stripping decades of tarnish and old gilding from the statue. It's the first regilding the statue has seen since 1992, when it was refreshed for the centennial of the World's Columbian Exposition.

The statue sits near Hayes and Richards drives, just west of the park's Inner Harbor, and has stood in that spot on the South Side since 1918. It was built to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1893 World's Fair and Illinois' 100th year of statehood, and it's a scaled-down copy of a 65-foot original that burned down shortly after the fair closed. That original had a nickname of its own: "Big Mary."

Park District spokesperson Irene Tostado said the first phase of work, stripping the old gilding, laser-cleaning the bronze and making repairs across the statue, will take two to three months and cost $1 million. Once that's done, crews will apply an epoxy primer, then a gold base layer, a gold polymer base and an adhesive, before finally applying thick gold leaf by hand.

The timeline has already slipped. Chicago's planning commissioner, Ciere Boatright, told federal officials in October that the restoration was on track to wrap up by mid-2027. Tostado said that date no longer holds, though she didn't offer a new one.

The regilding is one of several obligations the Park District and the Chicago Department of Transportation took on under a 2020 agreement that settled a federal review connected to the Obama Presidential Center, which is going up nearby in Jackson Park. That review, known as a Section 106 process under federal historic preservation law, started in 2017 and concluded that building the presidential center would alter the historic character of Jackson Park and the Midway Plaisance.

To offset that impact, the city and Park District agreed to a set of fixes. Besides regilding the Statue of the Republic, the agreement calls for rehabbing the English Comfort Station near the Museum of Science and Industry, a project the Park District did not provide updates on. It also required review of a new play area on the Midway Plaisance, which opened to the public last month, along with a plan to create interpretive materials on the park's history and its use by South Side residents, and a review of how trees lost during the Obama Center's construction would be replaced.

That underlying agreement was originally set to expire in December 2025. Tostado said the expiration won't stop work on the statue, the comfort station or the other unfinished pieces of the deal.

The Statue of the Republic has stood through a lot of change in Jackson Park already. It was there before the Museum of Science and Industry took its current shape, before the harbor was reworked, and long before construction crews and cranes became fixtures nearby for the presidential center project. Its gold surface, though, hasn't kept up with the South Side weather. Chicago winters and lakefront humidity have worn down the gilding applied in 1992, leaving the bronze visibly tarnished by the time scaffolding went up this month.

Applying gold leaf by hand across a 24-foot figure, layer by layer, takes time, which is part of why the Park District's cost estimate for just the first phase runs to seven figures. The full project, covering both the stripping and cleaning phase now underway and the eventual regilding, hasn't been given a combined price tag by the Park District.

For now, the statue will stay wrapped in fencing and scaffolding as crews work through the stripping, laser cleaning and structural repairs, weather permitting. No firm completion date has been set, and the Park District has not said when the statue will be uncovered or when a rededication, if any, might take place. Based on the district's two-to-three-month estimate for the first phase of work alone, the scaffolding around the statue is expected to remain up through the summer at minimum.