LMCC/Chicago Members Make Millennium Park Shine

Thousands of visitors come to Chicago’s Millennium Park each year to sit underneath the stars and enjoy live performances at the Jay Pritzker Music Pavilion. While they are dazzled by the impressive design, the seamless work of Local 134 union electricians truly make the structure shine.

Covering 24.5 acres, Millennium Park is located on Michigan Avenue, just north of the Art Institute of Chicago. Plans continue to be formulated to construct a beautiful, yet functional bridge that will join Millennium Park to the Art Institute. The 120-foot-high pavilion is the most sophisticated outdoor concert site of its kind in the United States. Surrounded by billowing curves of stainless steel and a massive steel trellis which spans the entire audience, the music venue has more than 4,000 fixed seats and a capacity for an additional 7,000 people on the 95,000-square-foot lawn.

Approximately 40 electricians worked on the City of Chicago showpiece, putting into operation 149 amplifiers capable of producing 316,000 watts of power, 72 main speakers (including flown left, right and center speakers as well as subwoofers) and 104 distributed overhead speakers for sound and acoustic reinforcement. They also installed a CobraNet digital signal processing and fiber optic signal transmission configuration along with 45 miles of speaker cable to connect the impressive system together.