It’s 5:30 a.m. on Thursday at Promontory Point. Two swimmers chart their course from the rocks, strapping swim caps around their chins and clipping brightly colored inflatable buoys around their waists. They descend the ladder on the edge of the rocks, wading through waist-high water before slipping in, bright neon swim caps indistinguishable from the buoys floating on the rippling surface. Surprised laughter echoes out as skin meets cold water. The sun is only just crossing the horizon, dyeing the sky a blazing pink and orange.  

Perched on the mismatched steps of the limestone revetment, it feels like it’s just me and the clouds of gnats, and maybe the occasional lone runner in the distance. Lake Shore Drive is quieter than usual, a dull thrumming in the background instead of its usual roar. The 4:50 a.m. wake-up call was brutal, but the sunrise makes me believe, if only for a moment, that I could start doing this more often. The rest of Hyde Park still shakes off its sleep—except for the swimmers, who continue to arrive at the Point, alert and ready to brave Lake Michigan’s open waters.  

A swimmer turns around the jutting end of the peninsula: long, careful freestyle strokes are punctuated with a splash as hands collide with the surface and the water gives way. He nears the rocks, grips onto the metal ladder, and hauls himself out of the water.  

Bill Stamets is a stalwart Point swimmer and a regular poster in the “Promontory Point Swimmers” Facebook group, where he shares daily pictures of water temperature readings held up against the backdrop of the sunrise. On the shore, he greets the new arrivals as he dries off. Today, Bill can’t linger as long as he usually does: he has a train to catch, and he hurries away before many of the usual faces can appear.  

Although he isn’t a swimmer, David Travis is one of the first few on the rocks. He snaps pictures of the sunrise on his phone and chats with the swimmers as they gear up. David has been photographing the sunrise swims for years. He says he’s also drawn to the water, but as a sailor, not a swimmer.  

Two more swimmers, Veronica Locher and Gretchen Wahl, head out, carving arrows through the gently rippling water. A duck passes through their wake. Tiny fish are hopping out of the water, which Gretchen later tells me is an unusual sight. She thinks it’s because the water is so calm today.  

Swimmers share news about family, work, and what books they’ve been reading as they clamber down the steep rocks. As one descends the ladder, her red goggles slip from her hands. Another swimmer dives in to search, rising out of the lake with the goggles in hand, hoisted up like a trophy.  

Alfred Caldwell, the Park District landscape architect who designed the Point, said that he hoped to build “a place you go to, and you are thrilled—a beautiful experience, a joy, a delight.” Every morning, the swimmers chase that thrill, risking freezing water and unruly waves.  

—  

The park wasn’t always there to swim off from. Underneath the peninsula’s grass is artificial landfill—mostly sand and garbage—which was constructed in the 1920s. An article from the Hyde Park Herald in 1926 described the “unsightly appearance” of the Promontory Point construction site, which had long been “used as a dumping ground for all sorts of rubbish—ashes, tin cans, broken brick, plastering from walls of demolished buildings, dirt from excavations, etc.” In warmer weather, residents of the nearby homes found that the lake breeze wafted ash, dust, and plaster from the landfill through their open windows. Sand had already been pumped in over the landfill near the north end of the peninsula, but work was slower on the southern side, where debris was still being hauled in by carts and wheelbarrows. Caldwell was put to work reshaping the promontory in 1936. His redesign included the central meadow and the hill upon which the fieldhouse would later be built. In an interview celebrating the park’s 50th anniversary, he said that he had hoped to convey “a sense of space and a sense of the power of nature and the power of the sea.”  

Caldwell took cues from the Midwest’s natural environment, planting native trees and plants. The historic limestone revetment, which the swimmers enter the water from, was meant to mimic the Midwest’s natural rock formations and glacial ridges.  

The sandpapery, pockmarked limestone slabs of the revetment curve and ebb, like stepping stones rising out of the lake. Scattered among them, you might see painted no-swimming signs with symbols of swimmers, mid-freestyle stroke, with red lines struck through them.  

People have been swimming at Promontory Point for decades—not always legally. Until the Chicago Park District created a designated swimming area, swimmers periodically faced legal consequences, such as tickets or even arrests.  

On a summer evening in 1987, two Point swimmers, Ted Erikson and Deborah Sigler, were ordered out of the water by lifeguards. When they refused, they were charged with disorderly conduct and breach of the peace. Another swimmer had already been arrested, just half an hour earlier. Although the Park District lifeguards usually turned a blind eye to the swimmers, a recent series of drownings had prompted a crackdown. Officials worried that swimmers set a bad example. Sigler and Erikson were handcuffed and briefly detained.  

Erikson had been a long time open-water swimmer and Hyde Park resident. In 1961, he was the first to swim across Lake Michigan, and in 1965, he crossed the English Channel, both ways. Up until his death in 2021, he continued to be a frequent Point swimmer. (Ask any of the regulars, and they’d be happy to share their stories.)  

“If I drown, I drown—and it’s a good way to go, incidentally,” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1987.  

Sigler, also a Hyde Park resident, told the Herald that she thought of the lake as her “swimming pool.”  

A day later, Erikson and Sigler led a “swim-in,” to protest their arrests. Erikson also circulated a “right to swim” petition, which allegedly garnered around 150 signatures. The conflict between swimmers and the city also played out across the pages of the Hyde Park Herald, where swimmers expressed their frustration with the lack of a clear policy on lake swimming through angry op-eds and letters to the editor. On one page, sandwiched between a tirade about shopping center development and a clarification that, actually, the Medici’s hamburgers are always fresh, is a letter from a Point swimmer to the Hyde Park Herald, which calls the lake “one of the joys of a Chicago summer.”  

“Our own experiences with swimming conditions have led to the conclusion that the Chicago Park District has, at present, essentially no policy, and that one is badly needed,” the letter writes. 

Tickets and citations continued, on-and-off, during the decades after Erikson and Sigler’s arrests. In a letter to the Hyde Park Herald, the Community Task Force for Promontory Point (which would later become the Promontory Point Conservancy), complained of “overzealous police officers” harassing swimmers and “criminalizing an innocent recreational activity.” In a 2008 letter to the Herald, Ted Erikson, then in his 40th year as a Point swimmer, asked, “Must we again remind the city that Lake Michigan belongs to the people?”  

— 

The swimmers weren’t the only ones in a fight against the city.  

You’ll see the Promontory Point Conservancy’s stickers around Hyde Park, on car bumpers, computers, and sometimes even dorm room walls. They flash catchy sayings like “Save the Point… Again!” and “LIMESTONE ROCKS!” For the past 24 years, the conservancy has been waging campaigns to save the Point again, and again, and again.  

Alfred Caldwell had designed the Point’s limestone lakefront to be made of blocks laid in terraced layers, which can be flexible under the crashing waves. This is one of the strengths of the design, according to Debra Hammond from the Promontory Point Conservancy. While concrete can crack under the water’s impact, the stones can move with the elements. Still, decades of storms and damage have left Caldwell’s limestone crumbling, rocks jutting like crooked teeth.  

In 2000, community meetings were convened in response to city plans to rebuild the historic revetment. The city had already replaced other stretches of lakefront with concrete, and Hyde Park residents hoped to save their remaining limestone.  

The Hyde Park Herald wrote that the crowd “mumbled and sighed” when an official from the Chicago Department of the Environment said that the limestone would be too expensive to fix. Swimmers also happened to be present at the meeting, with their own complaints and fears about water access.  

The activism in Hyde Park sparked animosity between Point organizers and the city. A year later, Fifth Ward alderman and Point advocate Leslie Hairston accused the Park District of excluding her from budget meetings and for unfairly targeting Hyde Park for recent activism. Similarly, a 2002 Hyde Park Herald editorial alleged that crackdowns on swimmers were in response to Point advocates.  

“As goose-pimpled swimmers hop from foot to foot while officers slowly write out tickets that judges historically have dismissed, we wonder: Is it because we fought so hard against the park district’s plan to replace the limestone and wood revetments at the Point?” the article asks. Just the year before, during heated battles over the revetment plan, park officials had announced that Point swimming would no longer be tolerated.  

“Is Hyde Park being punished for its activism?” the author asks. 

Since then, it’s been a back-and-forth between activists and the city. In recent years, the Conservancy secured Promontory Point’s listing on the National Register of Historic Places and achieved a Chicago Landmark designation. This February, the Point Conservancy sounded the alarm after obtaining drawings that showed the Department of Transportation’s proposed contractor’s plan for the Point, in which the revetment was replaced by concrete and ornamental limestone was scattered through the park. In a press release, the Conservancy predicted that, if the plans went through, the Point could be closed for three to five years.  

However, this May, the Conservancy breathed a sigh of relief. The Chicago Department of Transportation, Chicago Parks District, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a statement saying that there is “no intention of replacing the limestone with a continuous concrete revetment.”  

“To take away this space, you kill the community,” Jack Spicer, president and founder of the Promontory Point Conservancy, said in an interview with the Maroon.  

—  

There’s no single group of Point swimmers. There are the swimmers at dawn, groups who come later in the morning, and even the “happy hour crowd,” as one of the early risers calls them. Some swim every day, while others come less frequently. Experience and goals range: you’ll see anything from causal treading water to long-distance race training. The crew expands during the summer and ahead of races, with just a small group staying year-round.  Many of them are Hyde Park residents, although some make the journey from elsewhere in the city.  

Over time, the early morning Point swimmers have gotten to know one another, constructing their own language of landmarks and routes. They swim to “the lonely buoy,” pass by “the ugly sculpture,” go towards “the beautiful view.” Swimmers watch out for one another, careful not to lose anyone in the infinite blue.  

“It’s sort of like walking. There are paths, almost, that you can swim,” Alison Cuddy tells me.  

Alison is a writer, who has written extensively about her experiences as a year-round lake swimmer. She has been swimming in Lake Michigan since moving to Chicago in 1999. A friend who grew up in Hyde Park introduced her to the Point, and she fell in love. She eventually moved to Hyde Park and would swim after work, before connecting with the early morning Point swimmers and beginning to swim long-distances in the open water.  

“That’s when I realized, ‘Oh, I can swim all the time.’ And really swim,” Alison tells me.  

She says that the Point is an accepting place, with people drawn together by the lake.  

“You can get in and learn how to be in it and feel confident,” she says. “It’s interesting to swim alongside people who are competitive swimmers and people who are just learning how to swim. I love the continuum of that and feeling that there’s not any one way I have to be.”  

Veronica, a third-year Ph.D. student at UChicago and a fellow swimmer, also finds swimming at the Point to be an empowering experience.  

“Being there in a swimsuit requires vulnerability,” she says. “There are all of these different people with different bodies, all in swimsuits. Wrinkles, big bodies, smaller bodies, older bodies, younger bodies.”  

Veronica says her first year at UChicago was challenging, leaving her feeling “out of it” and needing “recentering.” She began going to the Point every morning to start her day, and, in July of 2023, began swimming with friends who were training for a triathlon.  

Veronica didn’t become a part of the community of early morning swimmers immediately.  

“No one really notices you until you have some form of consistency,” she says. But after a week of showing up daily, one of the older swimmers asked her for her name. Veronica says she was religious about learning the others’ names and soon became friends with them.  

“If I didn’t swim for a couple of days, they were like, “Where are you?” Veronica says.  

Alison and Veronica are both daily swimmers. Others, like Julia Scott, enjoy the Point whenever they can. Scott grew up in Hyde Park, before moving away for college. In her junior year, she studied abroad in Paris and decided to transfer to university there. She never left France, and has stayed to live, work, and raise a family there. For the past forty summers, she tells me, she has returned to her family’s home in Hyde Park. She’s been swimming at the Point since childhood and now brings her own children there, too.  

“When I do go back, I spend every day there. I cannot, actually, get enough of it. I think about it as soon as the weather starts getting nice, and I just need to get in that water,” she says. During her first, jet-lagged days back, Scott says that she swims at the sunrise. On those days, she often sees the early morning swimmers and says hello to them. She says that the first week home is “glorious.” 

In Europe, Scott unsuccessfully searched for substitutes for Promontory Point. Even Marseille, which is a few hours from Paris by train, is “no Lake Michigan,” she explains.  

“I think about growing old here, and I think about the Point a lot. I don’t know if I want to grow old in a place that’s landlocked and in a place where there’s no Point,” she says. “There’s something about the lake that feels so comforting and safe. I always feel so enveloped by it. When I’m in that lake, it feels really right. It’s almost like I can float there forever.” 

At the Point, she says, “it feels like we are in on this secret.” 

— 

One of the later swimmers to arrive is Deirdre Hamill-Squiers, who David calls the “den mother” of the group. She slowly descends the uneven steps, wearing a bulky scarf draped around her neck and a straw hat ringed with purple ribbon. I recognize her from “Swimming Through,” a short documentary about her and two other Point swimmers’ daily winter swims. In the film, Deirdre and her fellow swimmers delve into the icy water to find solace in the pandemic.  

She tells me that she’s been driving down here from Edgewater since 2002. She knows all of the swimmers and is the convener of the group’s weekly coffee meetups. 

She takes off her hat, switching it out for a rubber swim cap. The wind is gentle, and the lake is placid and impossibly blue. Alison tells me that that can change fast though. Sometimes, the waves are choppy, but other times, you feel big “rollers,” like the ocean. She tells me about a time when the water went from choppy waves to feeling almost like “swimming in molasses,” turgid and thick.  

“You really feel like you’re in something, and something’s going on in it, and it has nothing to do with you, and all you can do is respond to it and adapt to it,” she says.  

Alison says that she likes the feeling of being immersed in something larger than herself. She swims for the sensual experiences: the rocks, the landscape, and the currents of the water.  

“It’s kind of awe-inspiring because it’s such a force, that it can do all kinds of things that are scary in a way, but I feel very strong when I’m in the water,” she explains.  

According to Veronica, the best lake swimmers are in tune with the lake.  

“The lake dictates how you swim,” she says. “You learn how different waves feel on your body and when to turn up to breathe.”  

— 

On the paved path to the Point, by the 57th Street Beach, someone has spray-painted the words “Magic Protects This Space!” in large, looping black letters. The enchanted waters and the icy shock of the waves, the limestone carved with decades of messages and memories, and the fiery sunrises are all part of the magic that keeps Hyde Parkers (and Chicagoans from around the city) coming.  

But it’s not just magic that protects the space; it’s the people, too. Swimmers, students, conservationists, dog-walkers, and so many more, have all found something worth fighting for.  

—  

The swimmers pack up, slipping flippers into handbags and shrugging on jackets. Alison folds up her towel, which has an illustration of the Great Lakes on it. Deirdre hangs her scarf around her neck.  

It’s Thursday, so they’re off to Roux for coffee. When we leave the lake, it’s barely even 7:30 a.m

As I walk along 55th Street, a car slows and honks. Deirdre is waving from the window, with Veronica at the wheel. They grin and I wave back.