From "Running With the Bulls" to La Placita: The Story Behind Logan Square's Monument

I've lived in and around Logan Square for more than twenty years, long enough to remember when crossing the traffic circle on foot felt like a small act of bravery. So it's worth taking a minute, now that the redesign is finished, to look at where that circle came from and how it got its reputation in the first place.

A Monument to a Centennial

The Illinois Centennial Monument at the heart of the square was erected in 1918 to mark one hundred years of Illinois statehood. It anchors the Logan Square Boulevards Historic District, part of Chicago's historic boulevard system that connects a ring of grand, tree-lined streets across the city's West and Northwest Sides. The boulevards were designed to be genteel, walkable, and civic in character. For most of the twentieth century, that's exactly what the square around the monument was.

"Running With the Bulls"

That changed as car traffic grew. Over the decades, the circle around the monument became known among locals by a much less flattering nickname: "running with the bulls," a reference to how dangerous and disorienting it could feel to cross on foot or by bike, with cars merging from multiple directions at once. It became one of the neighborhood's most talked-about and least loved intersections, the kind of place longtime residents warned newcomers about.

A Decade of Advocacy

The push to fix it started in earnest in 2015, led by Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and took nearly a decade to move from advocacy to funding to construction. We covered the full timeline and every detail of what was built in an earlier post, but the short version is that Chicago spent roughly $27 million rebuilding the square from the ground up, this time designed around people rather than cars.

What Stands There Now

Today, the monument sits at the center of a plaza built for gathering, not just passing through. La Placita, the new space carved out of the old Kedzie roadway, was designed with Latin American heritage motifs that speak directly to who lives here now. On Sundays, the farmers market fills the square. In late June, the Arts Fest does the same. The monument itself hasn't moved an inch in over a hundred years. What's changed is everything around it, finally built to match what it always deserved to be: the actual center of the neighborhood.