Chicago murals: Girls’ lemonade stand leads to new murals in Lincoln Park tunnel

The new murals in Lincoln Park’s LaSalle Drive underpass started with two girls, a dream and a lemonade stand.

It ended up, says artist Cheri Charlton, as “this larger than life, illustrated storybook that you walk through,” featuring flora and fauna found in and around Chicago.

Titled “Day into Night: Lincoln Park’s Living Canvas,” the two 100-foot murals stretch through the tunnel connecting to the North Avenue Beach. On the south side, the mural is a detailed, summer day illustration of wildlife at Lincoln Park. Squirrels, robins, monarch butterflies, a cardinal, pelican and more all seem to be carrying on, blissfully unaware that their lives are captured in paint.

The north side features a nocturnal scene, with one owl spreading its wings in front of a backdrop of Lincoln Park row houses, while another owl turns its head to watch. Navy Pier fireworks explode while a bat soars in front of the moon. Native Lake Michigan fish swim lazily under water.

“I got to play with this journey, where we have nature landscapes of the city,“ Charlton says. “I really try to spark joy in people’s lives.”

The murals came about after Elizabeth and Lillian Jahn, now 11 and 10 years old, respectively, asked if their art teacher, Charlton, might paint murals in the drab tunnel they drove through every day on their way to their former school, Francis W. Parker School, from their home in Old Town. They liked the idea so much they held a lemonade stand to raise money for it. They earned $300, and the project was underway.

The girls’ mother, Julie Jahn, reached out to contacts through her work on the board of Lincoln Park Conservancy. They raised enough money to hire Chicago Public Art Group to shepherd the project through city permitting and other requirements. In fall 2025, Charlton began painting the mural with exterior latex, acrylic and spray paint.

The two girls, Jahn says, put in requests for animals that Charlton should include, like a squirrel and chipmunk, Jahn says. They also stopped to visit Charlton as she worked.

As a result, “there is something childlike about this mural,” Jahn says.

As they raised money, the project grew to belong not just to the girls, but all of Lincoln Park. Charlton weaved the names of donors in the leaves. Some donors asked to include the names of their deceased pets instead. One asked for the names of a pair of owls that were beloved in the neighborhood before they died from rat poison.

Now, the murals that started with a lemonade stand welcome guests through one of the busiest entrances to and exits from Lake Shore Drive, serving the Lincoln Park Zoo, the Peggy Notaebart Nature Museum, Green City Market and more.

“It exceeded our wildest dreams of what this could even look like,” Jahn says.