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Skip the all-black garb and the heavy eyeliner. This tour is more about history than headstones.

Monday Sep 25, 2006.     By Kate Rockwood

Travel + Tourism Feed

Sure, when most people take a trip to Graceland they're talking about the Tennessee mecca that housed the King, but Chicago's very own Graceland has plenty to boast in its own right: 119 acres of lush landscaping, a who's who roster of Chicago's historical elite, and a staggering mix of architectural designs.

Besides, with a location at the southern edge of Uptown, mere blocks from the Sheridan L, a trip to this Graceland is far cheaper than a plane ticket to Tennessee.

More focused on architecture and history than the headstones at-hand, the Graceland Cemetery tour weaves through the garden-like setting while tracing more than 100 years of Chicago history. Many of the most grand and ornate gravestones bear the same names as our city streets and any fan of Chicago will delight in learning the back-story of those buried here. From ornately sculpted mausoleums to jaw-dropping monuments with water views, those buried here were "limited only by their imaginations and their pocketbooks," neither of which was skimpy.

Sign me up: Tickets for the two-hour walking tour are $10 for nonmembers, $5 for students and seniors, and free to members of the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Tours run at 2 p.m. the first Sunday in August and every Sunday September through October, and start at the entrance of the cemetery (the northeast corner of Irving Park Road and Clark Street). Reservations aren't required unless your group tops 10 people. The tours run rain or shine, so if there's a cloud in the sky you might want to pack an umbrella. The last five minutes of the tour I attended had our group of 15 drenched and huddled under a mere six umbrellas.

Sites you'll see: A smorgasbord of burial sites of famous Chicagoans, including Marshall Field, Louis Sullivan, Charles Wacker, Potter Palmer, John Medill, Daniel Byrnham and George Pullman. You'll also get up close and personal with gravestones that run the architectural gamut, from the Egyptian pyramid flanked by a sphinx and angel that marks the grave of Peter Schoenhoffen to the highly classical columns of the Kimball monument to the simple granite rectangle of Mies van der Rohe.

Golden nugget: You'll learn the late-night burial details of the Goodman grave, a stage-like monument at ground level that can only be entered by boat from the lake below.

Who's da guide: Trained, volunteer docents lead the unscripted tours, which means plenty of opportunity for questions mixed with quirky bits of history and trivia. With 18 years of docent experience under her belt, our guide was a pro at drawing participants out of their silence without turning the tour into a chatfest and, having already purchased her own future plot in the cemetery, she knew the ins and outs of the cemetery's entire history.

Fuel your tank: Unless you show up with stowed snacks in your bag, prepare to wait until you're outside the cemetery gates before finding food. If a two-hour stroll leaves you feeling peckish, you're only a 10-minute walk from a bite and a beer at the sparkly-on-the-outside mellow-on-the-inside Hollywood Club.

Snooze-fest or eye-opener: As a city-dweller who can sometimes go weeks without being in a big green space, a walk through Graceland was a real treat. The tour passed in a snap thanks to its brisk walking pace and balanced blend of architectural highlights, historical anecdotes and gravestone trivia, and left me feeling fully primed for future cocktail conversations.

Even locals will learn: About the train station that used to exist inside the cemetery, accessed by special rented train cars that would transport mourners to the cemetery, which was at that time outside city limits.

For more information, visit www.architecture.org or call (312) 922-3432 x226.