She is working like a commodities trader, her hands in perpetual motion as she speaks. Her ”pit” is filled with the din of CTA elevated trains clattering overhead as she moves from one group of ”traders” to the next, bartering with them, pleading, cajoling, ”What do you need from us to make this work?”
In the often fractured and fractionated world of big-city bureaucracy, Kathy Dickhut of City Open Lands Project is addressing a group of city officials and residents she has managed to assemble at a most unusual meeting site-a narrow strip of land bordered by the concrete wall of Graceland Cemetery on one side and the ”L” tracks on the other, a section of what was once a railroad right-of-way in the back of the 4000 to 4400 blocks of North Kenmore Avenue. There with Dickhut, amid piles of illegally dumped rubbish, remnants of abandoned vehicles and the graffiti on the cemetery wall, are officials of the Chicago Park District, the Department of Streets and Sanitation, the Chicago Transit Authority and the Chicago Police Department. Also present are other members of the Open Lands organization, representatives of community groups and an aide of 46th Ward Ald. Helen Shiller.
Eyeing the site, Patricia Reskey of the East Graceland Community Association says, ”This is the classic worst of urban America.”
”They`ve used this property for five movies, and it isn`t because it`s pretty,” says neighborhood resident Joe Cain.
But what Dickhut sees through all the grit and grime is a park-yes, a nice, well-kept park that would serve the people living around this area of North Kenmore Avenue-and that is the vision she is vigorously trying to sell to her audience.
”The Open Lands people came to us and said they wanted to make a park back here,” says Walter Netsch, a Chicago Park District commissioner, ”and I said, `No way, unless you can get us some of these abandoned lots.` ”
Simply to turn the area into a 4-block-long park that is only about 60 feet at its widest wouldn`t make sense, Netsch argues. Such a park, he says, would serve only the residents of the apartment buildings backing into it and could easily provide cover for all kinds of illegal activities.
Netsch instead proposes a series of T-shaped parks accessible from Kenmore Avenue with housing units facing several park-entry areas. Because this plan would necessitate the annexation of adjoining properties, Dickhut in turn has already started inquiring about the ownership of vacant lots along the area between West Irving Park Road and West Montrose Avenue.
Open Lands is a Chicago nonprofit conservation-oriented organization. Now in its 25th year, it has championed the 120-mile Illinois and Michigan Canal National Heritage Corridor, helping to bring together a vast array of local governments to protect the environment from Navy Pier in the city to LaSalle- Peru Downstate. And it worked with the city to develop the 1973 Chicago Lakeshore Protection Ordinance that later successfully thwarted proposals to build a lakefront airport.
Its City Open Lands Project, headed by Dickhut, serves as a catalyst to assist community groups throughout the city. It has helped a day-care center acquire land for use as a tot lot, assisted a group of Hmong immigrants in starting a garden on land leased from the Metropolitan Sanitary District and aided a block club in Lawndale to gain title to a city lot and receive gardening grants from the Chicago Botanic Garden.
Open Lands also has a tree-planting and tree-care division that is seeking to reverse a decline in the number of trees on private property in the city and to get the city`s Bureau of Forestry to inventory street trees as a step to managing one of Chicago`s finest resources. Another division, called Greenways, works to find ways to link recreational resources together through trails, waterways and linear parks.
An affiliate organization, CorLands, helps park districts acquire land by negotiating the sale of properties and holding them for as long as three years until the districts can put together their funding. An associate group, Wetlands Research Inc., is studying the Des Plaines River along a 2.8-mile stretch that has been purchased by the Lake County Forest Preserve District. The area is a part of a flood plain being threatened by encroaching urbanization, and the goal of the Wetlands Research study is to show how a reshaping of this and similar areas could lead to such environmental benefits as improved water quality for the river, reduced flooding and an expanded wildlife habitat.
To Gerald Adelmann, the Open Lands executive director who spent years negotiating the Illinois and Michigan Canal project, the situation on North Kenmore Avenue is related to the problems affecting the entire urban-surburban landscape. ”Chicago has far less open space than many other cities; we rank fairly far down the list,” he says. New York City has more recreation land per capita than Chicago. But there is a lot of vacant land in Chicago, almost 20 square miles of it. ”That is derelict land, not open space,” he says, defining open space as a place that people can enjoy, whether developed for recreation or allowed to revert to the prairie that once was called a
”boundless English park” and a ”gift from God.”
The city`s method of keeping track of land ownership is one reason that Chicago`s 20 square miles of empty land are languishing. To help remedy the situation, Dickhut has traveled to 14 U.S. cities to study and compare their methods of recording land ownership, and her land inventory report is pushing the city toward improving its antiquated methods, all in due time, of course. Dickhut learned her way through governmental mazes while earning a master`s degree in landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin. She admits she knows little about plants or design, explaining that the Wisconsin program centered on ”people and policy and landscape, people`s participation in managing the landscape.” And she notes that ”there are a lot of nonprofit agencies springing up to do this kind of work where the government can`t get the work done.”
Few people appreciate Open Lands` efforts more than Becky Severson, who has started 19 community gardens in the city since 1980 as coordinator of the Chicago Botanic Garden`s Green Chicago Program. ”I worked so long in Uptown at the beginning,” she says. ”There is a lot of open space there, and what you begin to realize is that it is easy on the eye there, there`s a different feeling there. People take that for granted; they don`t realize the impact of what open areas they have. Sure, the lots are full of litter and weeds, but at least you`re not surrounded by tall buildings. There are a lot of Asian immigrants in Uptown, and there are dozens of community gardens there where people are just squatting on the land.
”The key is, when the group starts, they`ve got to think long-term because a couple of years down the road they`ll want to make the garden permanent, and (by then) it may be hard for them. They may be on the wrong land. A lot of times they choose the site because it is in the center of the block or next to where they live, but if they`d look at all the lots on the block and look for permanence, we`d have some more permanent gardens.”
Of the community gardens that she has helped set up, ”we`ve lost two,” Severson says, and some more are endangered. From now on, ”it will be mandatory that (gardening groups) meet with Open Lands before we talk to them (about gardening grants). The idea of permanence is beyond them.” Yet it is clear that when the colorful plantings make the neighborhood look better, property values go up in the area, specifically for the garden lot itself, which then becomes much easier for the often-long-missing owner to sell.
The first success achieved through this new strategy is the Grenshaw Goody Community Garden in the 3900 block of West Grenshaw Street in Lawndale. Open Lands helped the block club obtain title to the city-owned parcel and plant the trees, and Severson provided the expertise and equipment to get the rest of the garden started.
The 20 square miles of vacant property within the city may seem ample enough to meet the various demands of park enthusiasts, homebuilders and commercial developers. Inevitably, however, conflicts arise over how a certain lot should be used. Dickhut cites a vacant lot in Hyde Park that developers want to add to a commercial strip but which a group of residents, who have turned to Dickhut for support, wants to annex to Nichols Park.
The lot, directly across from a McDonald`s restaurant on East 53d Street, is an obvious site for new businesses. But Stephanie Franklin, speaking for the community group that she leads, says: ”We don`t have enough local park space. We should have 34.9 acres of local parks and playlots in Hyde Park. We have 12.7 acres.” Nichols Park, now 7 acres in size, could be enlarged by two more acres by annexing the lot in question.
Other interests have offered a compromise plan for the lot that would include open space in a combination of townhouses and businesses, but Franklin is adamant: ”That open space has to be a park, not just space within a development, not a yard for a townhouse. We want a landscaped lot that will remain perpetually public.” At her group`s urging, the Chicago Park District has agreed to investigate buying the land.
On the Far Southeast Side, Tom Farr and a group of residents want to have a piece of tax-delinquent property transferred to the park district and left open to become, they hope, a habitat for birds and other wildlife. The property lies across a railroad track from Calumet Park. ”Open Lands would be our representative in that process because we`re not a legal group,” he says. ”Around here, no piece of land is safe from the bulldozer,” Farr adds. ”This is a very industrialized area. Things happen to just any fragment of land, (becoming) parking lots and storage places for things associated with the steel mills and the trucking industry. That`s my greatest fear. We`re stuck in the middle of this ugly development, and a lot of it is rusting now.”
Other ideas have been voiced on how to use the land, but Farr`s proposal, that it revert to nature, won out. ”We agreed that we had to keep it clean,” he says, ”but even that has different meanings to different people. We had teens working in there for hours pulling out dead branches and debris. They thought it was litter and junk, but that is part of the appeal to me.” To Farr, the leaves and branches are suitable cover for wildlife.
Up north along the Evanston border, one tract of land has been turned into a park through the sheer determination of local residents. Reskey, a civic activist who has worked not just with the East Graceland Community Association but with many other groups and projects, says it all started in the early `70s, when a group in Rogers Park started to seek land for a park. Because the park district was not then acquiring land for new parks, the group undertook the entire project on its own and targeted the land they wanted.
”The tract was made up of unused urban-renewal properties for which there was no specific site plan; it was unused property that was just languishing,” Reskey says. ”By the time it was cleared and (still) no feasible use for the site was determined, it was about 1981-82. We
incorporated in 1984, made major site improvements in 1987 and had our grand opening that year.”
The result is Triangle Park, a wedge-shaped parcel on West Jonquil Terrace just south of Evanston`s Calvary Cemetery and east of the CTA`s Howard Street yard. Carefully landscaped with young trees and open green areas and equipped with playground equipment, the park serves local residents and is frequently used by children attending day-care sessions at the nearby Howard Area Community Center. The Triangle Park group has a long-term lease on the land and recently negotiated a similar deal for a lot across the street from the park for use as a community garden.
”To the best of my knowledge, it is the only public park in Chicago that is not part of the park district,” says Reskey. Negotiations are now underway that would lead to the park district taking over ownership of the park and adding to its facilities, but for now, Reskey says, ”It is ours; we are responsible for managing the park.”
Triangle Park serves as a model for groups groping through the bureaucratic maze. ”Open Lands per se was not involved, but we worked with them to show how to work with this issue, to share strategies,” Reskey says. ”People like those in East Graceland feel that something like this couldn`t be done, so we try to boost their spirits and tell them it is not easy but that it can be done.”
While it took more than a decade to negotiate Triangle Park`s lease, buying property outright can be almost as complicated. The city takes possession of tax-delinquent properties and then sells them to bidders at auction, and it is through this process that Taylor House, a social-service agency, is attempting to provide a suitable outdoor play area at its day-care center at 915 N. Wolcott Ave. in the lower end of the West Town area. With Dickhut`s help, the agency has traced the ownership of two adjacent lots behind the day-care center and arranged to buy them with a noncash bid, and Dickhut is keeping track of a third lot to see when it may become available.
”We`re going on two years, and we`ll get the deeds at the end of summer,”
says Holly Seplocha, child-development administrator of Taylor House.
Seplocha says that with the noncash bid process, Taylor House will not have to pay tax liens and back taxes on the properties, though it will have to pay legal fees, which can be substantial, to transfer the deeds. As part of the deal to obtain the lots, Taylor House agreed to use them only as a playlot.
”We have 80 Head Start children, 40 preschool day-care children and 40 school-age children,” Seplocha says, ”and no more than 20 can use the
(existing) playlot at one time now. There are no city parks nearby.”
Looking ahead, she adds: ”We will start working on the playlots as soon as we obtain title. We`ve already started looking for funding, writing grants and whatnot.”
Explaining Open Lands` role in the Taylor House project, Dickhut says:
”There are two types of open spaces-open to the whole public and open to a specific public. We surveyed day-care centers to see if private centers had sufficient play spaces, and most don`t. That`s how we came to help Taylor House. We would like to do more day-care centers.”
Back in her ”pit” under the ”L” tracks off North Kenmore Avenue, Dickhut`s bartering session with her group of ”traders” is just about over. She has taken account of all the give and take, the viewpoints of all sides, the hopes and the fears and the ”yes-if`s” of everyone, and she remains positive. ”We haven`t brought this many people together ever,” she says, an upbeat tone in her voice, as she concludes the meeting and heads for her battered red pickup to attend yet another.
