Nina Helstein has been celebrating the memory of lawyer and Hyde Park resident Clarence Darrow with other Chicagoans nearly every March 13 at a bridge named after him in Jackson Park since she was a young girl.
“We come, rain or shine, whatever the day is,” Halstein said while holding a yellow daffodil in her hand. “I have stood under umbrellas, and sometimes it’s very cold.”
But this year, Helstein — now 81 — got to enjoy the mid-March event in warm weather with blue skies, joining other attendees in reflecting on the words of the famed lawyer and activist, his dedication toward fighting for free speech and labor unions, and how his fight rings true today for many.
The event to honor Darrow’s memory has been held every March 13 at the bridge since 1957, almost 20 years after Darrow’s death. Typically, a wreath is thrown into the Jackson Park Lagoon that’s just behind the Museum of Science and Industry, but in more recent years attendees have thrown flowers into the lagoon, as they did Thursday.
The Chicago-based lawyer led the charge in multiple high-profile cases. Darrow defended teenagers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in their 1924 murder case, successfully ensuring that his clients would not receive the death penalty for killing Bobby Franks. Darrow was also a prominent defender of labor unions, representing union leader Eugene Debs during the 1894 Pullman strike, when the Pullman Co.’s workers were striking for higher wages.
About a year after the Leopold and Loeb case, Darrow defended 24-year-old Tennessee high school teacher Thomas Scopes for teaching Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in the classroom. At the time, teaching evolution in classrooms was not allowed in Tennessee, and Darrow felt it was important to challenge that law. Thursday’s flower-tossing event noted this year’s 100th anniversary of the Scopes trial.
“He felt that if today we prohibit certain kinds of teaching, tomorrow we’ll be prohibiting certain kinds of speech and certain kinds of thinking,” Anita Weinberg, whose parents helped organize the very first bridge event, said to the crowd. “He saw the trial as a fight against an attempt to turn the country into bigoted, intolerant theocracy.”
For attendees, whether it is attacks on First Amendment rights or to the conditions of modern-day prisons, Darrow’s fight still rings true.
“I really love doing this every year, but I particularly feel sort of a kinship and a connection to this during this time and this period. As we know, what’s happening in D.C. has been an extreme attack when it comes to our civil liberties and our rights,” state Sen. Robert Peters said to the crowd.
“You would think that after we defeated a bunch of authoritarianism in Europe, we wouldn’t be here,” Peters said. “And yet, looking at what’s happened in D.C., it can be a depressing thing to look at.”
In addition to commemorating the memory of Darrow, attendees also commemorated the bridge itself, which has been shuttered for years and was added to Preservation Chicago’s 2025 list of most endangered Chicago structures.
Jack Spicer, a board member of the Hyde Park Historical Society, said he and those working to help preserve the bridge have been waiting about six months for a report from the Chicago Department of Transportation on the current state of the bridge and what the agency wants to do to fix it.
CDOT, which owns the bridge, said in a statement to the Tribune that it recognizes the bridge’s historic importance and is working with state and federal partners on the preliminary engineering of the project.
“Preservation groups have been fighting for years to make sure that this bridge, a significant fixture here in Jackson Park, is renovated and restored,” said Ald. Desmon Yancy, 5th.
Designed by famed Chicago architectural firm Burnham and Root, the bridge, originally known as the Columbia Drive Bridge, has spanned Jackson Park’s lagoon since 1880, offering picturesque views and passage to the lakefront.
It predates the nearby Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, whose building was part of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1957, the structure was renamed for Darrow, a Hyde Park resident who frequented the bucolic bridge while contemplating cases.
Jackson Park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and the bridge also falls within the boundary of the 1994 Chicago Landmark designation for the Museum of Science and Industry. But the stone bridge has fallen into disrepair, with the CDOT cordoning it off to pedestrian traffic. It has been closed to the public since 2015.
Yancy said there are two commitments toward funding for the restoration project, one from the Obama Foundation and another that is supposed to come directly from the city. Money from the state is also supposed to go toward funding bridge repairs, Yancy said.
“We are hoping that we can preserve it in such a way that they use all the available historic material and will resemble the original bridge as it was at the time of the fair,” Spicer said. “We have our fingers crossed, and we’ve been working as much as we can with CDOT to make this happen.”
Before throwing flowers into the water, participants read excerpts of Darrow’s opening statement in the Scopes trial.
“It is impossible, if you leave freedom in the world, to mold the opinions of one man upon the opinions of another, only tyranny can do it,” Scott Burgh, a retired law library director who had been coming to the event for years, read aloud. “And our constitutional provision, providing a freedom of religion, was meant to meet that emergency.”
A symposium to accompany the flower-tossing event will also be held at Harold Washington Library at 6 p.m. Thursday, where speakers from organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom to Read Foundation will speak about what people can learn from the Scopes trial and why book banning is seeing a resurgence in the U.S.
