Carl F. Fuerst didn’t know it at the time, but the water playground he designed a decade ago for the Bensenville Park District began a chain reaction that would spread across the Chicago area, and then across the country.
Despite the skepticism of some residents who fought against this wave of the future, Bensenville replaced its traditional swimming pool in 1985 with the Bensenville Water Park. These family aquatic centers with features such as water slides, waterfalls and sandy “beaches” are becoming commonplace on the suburban landscape, but 10 years ago they were an unknown commodity.
“We had three major public hearings in Bensenville, with hundreds of people there,” says Fuerst, president of Leisure Concepts and Design Inc. in Mt. Prospect., which pioneered the family aquatic center. “They were taking some risks by doing this.”
One of the most novel ideas Fuerst incorporated into the Bensenville Water Park was the zero-depth entry, where people can walk down a slope into the pool. Fuerst says that to the best of his knowledge, this was the first park district facility in the country to build such a pool, “and the codes didn’t even exist in Illinois to allow us to build it.” (The codes were changed.)
The zero-depth concept proved to be the most popular innovation at these new water parks. “It’s without a doubt the single biggest change in aquatics across the country today,” says Fuerst, “and it’s being introduced just everywhere.”
And often those introductions are being made by Leisure Concepts and Design. After creating the Bensenville facility, communities including Lisle and Skokie asked Fuerst’s company to design similar aquatic centers, and soon requests were being made for designs by park districts across the country.
Leisure Concepts and Design has created about 70 water parks in the last 10 years, Fuerst says. The list of Chicago-area park districts that have aquatics centers designed by Leisure Concepts and Design includes Bartlett, Batavia, Bensenville, Calumet Memorial, Clarendon Hills, Des Plaines, Fox Valley, Hoffman Estates, Lisle, Lombard, Niles, Orland Park, Skokie, Vernon Hills, West Chicago, Wheaton, Wheeling, Wood Dale and Zion.
While there’s competition from architects and other designers, Fuerst remains one of the country’s experts. In the last year, the Mt. Prospect resident has spoken on converting traditional pools to aquatic centers at national conferences in Minneapolis, Orlando and Mesa, Ariz.
“He’s highly respected and very knowledgeable,” says Walter Johnson, regional director of the National Recreation and Park Association, which has an office in Hoffman Estates. “He’s very patient, and he leaves no stone unturned as he deals with the elected officials and citizens as far as the impact on the community, the neighborhood, finances . . . whatever they need to know.”
Leisure Concepts and Design doesn’t actually build these projects. It’s the firm’s job to come up with the design by first studying the needs and resources of a park district, then drawing a conceptualization. If the community decides to build the facility, it hires architects who work with Fuerst’s company to carry out the project.
Fuerst’s background is in parks and recreation. He was a park and recreation director in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, for 14 years before coming to the Chicago area about 24 years ago to open a regional office for the National Recreation and Park Association, which is based in Arlington, Va.
After three years in that position, Fuerst went to work for a Chicago architectural firm for a couple of years. Then, 18 years ago, he began Leisure Concepts and Design, his own consulting business for park and recreation departments.
“The object was to provide services at the municipal level, because there was no one with experience in the field,” Fuerst says. “Architects and engineers and landscape architects with different backgrounds were acting as consultants to parks and recreation, and that didn’t seem to be right. There seemed to be a gap.”
So, from a basement office in his Mt. Prospect home, Fuerst stepped into that breach. At first, most of his consulting work involved dry land, creating master plans for communities, doing facilities and feasibility studies for parks departments wanting to expand their offerings.
The first person Fuerst hired was a landscape architect to help him design parks and playgrounds. That was the focus for the first seven or so years.
Then Bensenville contacted Leisure Concepts and Design for ideas on replacing a pool that had been shuttered for two years.
As he tried to reinvent the public swimming pool, Fuerst, who is a grandfather of five, recalled going swimming with his own three children. He wanted a pool where parents and children could interact and play with each other.
“We thought he was one of the premier people as far as studying pools and researching parks,” says Bob Kunkel, director of the Bensenville Park District. “He’d looked at commercial pools that were drawing crowds while rectangular park district pools were not.
“We were confident this would work.”
And it did, immediately drawing 800 to 900 people a day to Bensenville’s new aquatic center, while the old pool had drawn about 200 people a day. That experience has been duplicated at other aquatic centers.
“Family aquatic centers have shown a leap in attendance, and the vast majority of them make money,” Johnson says.
“This will continue to grow. It has put the fun back in swimming.
“Pools built in the ’50s and ’60s are rapidly deteriorating, and coupled with that is the fact that they have traditionally been subsidized heavily by taxes and not been self-supporting through fees. The traditional pools also had limitations, with an emphasis on competition instead of fun and recreation.”
Leisure Concepts and Design now has five employees who work in modest offices in the basement of a two-story office building on Golf Road. Besides Fuerst and a secretary, the firm employs landscape architects Douglas Gotham of Lombard and Larry Raffel of Skokie and aquatics planner Claude Rogers of Mundelein.
Gotham and Raffel do most of the parks and playground designing, and Rogers, who also is a landscape architect, creates the aquatic centers in conjunction with Fuerst.
Fuerst, 66, makes the initial contacts with the park districts, meeting with officials and residents to determine what kind of facility they want and can afford. (They can cost anywhere from $500,000 to $5 million.) That information gets turned over to Rogers, who designs the facility.
“It’s getting more and more to the point where they each want something unique in their facility,” Rogers says. “In the initial round of things, each one was unique because no one had seen these before.”
Rogers can customize pools with the help of companies that produce made-to-order fiberglass play structures. In Niles, for example, the water play area is next to the park district’s ice rink, so child slides that look like polar bears were made to maintain a wintry theme.
The Wheeling Park District Aquatics Center is one of Leisure Concepts’ larger facilities, with a 1,500-bather capacity. Entering its third season, the center is coming off a summer in which 76,000 people came through the turnstyles.
“It’s one of the better attended facilities,” Fuerst says, “and they’ve been very happy with it. It has a full complement , including water slides, drop slides, zero-depth entry, sand volleyball and a very active wet-sand children’s play area.”
Fuerst’s company presently is working with 17 different architects on pool projects across the country, including one in Hoffman Estates. He was in Portland this spring to do a master plan of all the aquatic facilities in that city. Five pools are scheduled to be renovated. He also was in Manchester, Iowa this spring for a smaller project, meeting with the mayor and City Council to talk about what kind of aquatic and city center they can build for their own 5,000 residents.
“We have to create an educational process and show people what’s available to them,” he says. “The community is generally supportive.”
And when there is opposition, it’s Fuerst’s job to stand up at community meetings and try to sway the doubters. In Downers Grove and Buffalo Grove, for example, Fuerst was unable to convince the opposition, and the money for new pools was voted down. In Hoffman Estates, there was a heated battle over the building of a new facility, which now is under construction.
“I’ve seen commissioners beaten out of their positions by people opposed to the projects,” Fuerst says. “And then the project went ahead and the opposition came back and told me, `You know, it really worked out to be pretty nice.’
“That’s very gratifying. I get great satisfaction out of seeing people enjoy themselves at these projects.”
