Millennium Park's Crown Fountain Perfected by Boom Lifts
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July 7, 2004 - Featured in Chicago 's new 6,000 square-foot Millennium Park, the Crown Fountain is a $10 million gift from the Crown and Goodman families to the residents of the Windy City . The two glass towers making up the fountain encase large LED screens that project a montage of 1,000 Chicago residents' faces. But before its official unveiling this month, some of the glass bricks used to build the towers showed minor imperfections. Walsh Construction was called in to replace the bricks with access to the job was provided by Illini Hi-Reach, Lemont, Ill.
This interactive water feature is made up of two 50-foot-tall custom-fabricated glass towers, which stand 150 feet apart in a 232-foot-long, black granite reflecting pool as water cascades from the top and fills the pool up to 1/8-inche deep. The floor of the reflecting pool beneath the towers wasn't designed for heavy loads, so erecting scaffolding around four sides of the towers would have been expensive, time consuming, and could have cracked the pool floor.
In place of scaffolding, Illini-Hi-Reach delivered an 80-foot JLG Model 800S telescopic boom lift and two 86-foot JLG Model 860SJ telescopic boom lifts with jib extensions. The boom lifts have a 71-foot and 75-foot horizontal reach, respectively, and they were set up on the perimeter of the reflecting pool and extended over to reach the top of the towers. Both boom lifts have fixed axles and can be used without outriggers, so the machines could be deployed quickly and moved around this crowded jobsite without difficulty.
Working alongside a JLG Model 80HX boom lift on the site, the three new JLG boom lifts were used to replace the defective blocks, and Millennium Park visitors now can enjoy a perfected fountain.
