Graceland Cemetery

Graceland is where Chicago buried the men who built it. Thomas Bryan founded the cemetery in 1860 on eighty-six acres north of the city — one of the rural-cemetery movement's masterworks, designed in sequence by William Saunders, H.W.S. Cleveland, William Le Baron Jenney, and Ossian Simonds. The landscape was the argument: curving drives, unfenced plots, Lake Willowmere, native plantings — a park that happened to hold the dead, where Victorian families picnicked among the graves.

The residents are the city's architecture — literally. Daniel Burnham lies on his own island in Lake Willowmere, the planner of the 1893 World's Fair buried in the landscape he helped invent. Louis Sullivan rests under a rough-hewn stone at his parents' grave — the father of the skyscraper marked plainly, while the two tombs he designed for others — the Getty and the Ryerson — are among the cemetery's masterpieces. Mies van der Rohe, Jenney, Fazlur Khan, John Root, Holabird and Roche: the Cemetery of Architects holds the skyline's authors.

Lorado Taft's Eternal Silence — the hooded bronze figure over the Graves plot — is the cemetery's icon and its haunting story: the statue that legend says you cannot look at without seeing your own death in the face, that cannot be photographed clearly. The marshals of industry are here too — Pullman, Palmer, McCormick, Field, Armour — the merchants who made Chicago second to none, in the ground designed by the architects who made it beautiful.

Graceland is the archive's architects file — the garden cemetery where the men who built Chicago lie under the trees their colleagues planted, guarded by a bronze figure whose face folklore warns you not to meet.