Look at the clothing of a typical Chicagoan playing in the park on a Sunday, and you’ll get an idea of how Chicago’s parks have changed.
In the late 1800s, when most of what would become the city’s parks was prairie or farmland, parkgoers dressed in their Sunday best and strolled through Lincoln Park.
In the 1970s, softball players dressed in T-shirts and sweats ran bases, as families, in their most comfortable clothes, barbecued.
Today, softball players and picnickers still flock to the parks on Sundays, but many have been replaced by volleyball players in tank tops and shorts and in-line skaters in spandex.
The new Chicago Park District has some of the same great programs and old problems as the old, but as Chicago families have fewer children and the nature of sport changes, the district tries—sometimes in fits and starts, sometimes successfully—to respond to changes in how people play.
“What kind of shocks people is that after so many decades of absolutely nothing happening in the parks, that so much is happening, and it seems to be happening so fast,” said Ald. Mary Ann Smith (48th), head of the City Council’s Committee on Parks and Recreation.
“The physical parts of the parks, it’s a great improvement over years ago,” said Kay Clement, a longtime South Side park activist. Clement particularly praises the rehab work going on at Jackson Park Lagoon and other upgrades in recent years.
“With the cleaning of the lagoon, Jackson Park is getting the attention that it should have gotten years ago,” she said.
One thing hasn’t changed: The easiest way for the Park District to show Chicagoans that it is doing something with its $334.5 million budget is for it to add to the 550-plus parks and 266 field houses.
Although park advocates fault the city for being low on actual open space—something General Supt. David Doig has been aggressively trying to correct in recent years—they praise Chicago for its large number of recreational programs. And it’s only the field houses—many of which have undergone extensive renovation over the last 20 years—that give the Park District the ability to offer programs as diverse as pottery making, yoga and–in a recently added program–trapeze lessons.
Smith, whose North Side ward includes the Broadway Armory, 5917 N. Broadway, where the Flying Gaonas give their trapeze lessons, said she believes Chicagoans will see continued innovation in the parks.
“Having a trapeze thing at Broadway was never something that was even in anyone’s dreams,” she said. “It’s important to know that they’re using their resources and trying to make them work to their highest potential.”
The crown jewel among new park facilities is the Homan Square Fieldhouse, 3559 W. Arthington St., part of a complex built last year in North Lawndale on the site of the former Sears Catalog Distribution Center.
The Homan Square Community Center cost $28 million, with $15 million from three government partners–the city, public schools and the Park District. Community partners raised $13 million, some from state tax-funded sources.
The field house shares a building with Family Focus of North Lawndale, a YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago Child and Family Center, the Robert Crown Center for Health Education, the Lawndale Christian Health Center and The Neighborhood Technology Resource Center.
Public-private partnerships
Doig has held up the Homan project as a model for other public-private partnerships involving the Park District.
Although other work would be “maybe not to this scale,” Doig cited the revitalization of Garfield Park Conservatory and the recent renovation, partly with the help of Friends of Lincoln Park, of the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool. (The latter was known as Rookery, the small bird sanctuary south of Fullerton Parkway near the Lincoln Park Zoo). They are other examples of community groups working to breathe new life–and inject new funds–into their own park facilities, he said.
“When we can get that kind of support, we can make the public-sector money go further,” Doig said.
The Park District tries to get even the smallest park advisory councils involved in raising funds for items as small as playground equipment, and Doig praises those who help their neighborhood parks.
Looking at bottom line
Critics, however, say Doig is putting too much emphasis on raising private money for tax-supported facilities.
It’s easy to see, though, that Doig is just being realistic. As costs for workers and materials went up in the 1990s, the Park District held the line on taxes until last year.
Privatization of services such as harbors and golf courses have helped stoke the district’s bottom line, and some fees have risen, though Doig said Chicago’s fees for swimming and other sports are lower than most surrounding suburbs. But even as Doig plays up the relative cost of the programs, some longtime park advocates question what they see as an increased emphasis on higher fees.
Some advocates, such as Polly Silberman, vice president of the South Shore Cultural Center Advisory Council, say the fee increases have hit hard.
“They say there’s been no increase in the taxes in the parks,” Silberman said. “If you’re a park user, that’s not true because you’re paying more.”
Silberman and others also worry about staff cutbacks at neighborhood parks.
In the early 1990s, construction trade unions felt the brunt of the layoffs as the district tried to get out of the construction and heavy-maintenance business. In recent years, cuts have begun to hit more recreation employees. Although few workers have lost their jobs, many have had their hours reduced or shuffled, Doig said, to better reflect the program needs at individual parks.
Changing needs
Changes in demand drive changes in the parks, Doig noted.
As Chicagoans and Americans in general have turned away from team sports to doing their own thing, the Park District has tried to respond. Sometimes this means changing the use of a field house; sometimes it translates into a new set of programs.
Because park officials always are looking for new sources of revenue and ways to expand programs without spending more money, the district in recent years has tried to use private contractors to introduce some new recreational activities.
Some attempts at new offerings, such as batting cages at a few parks, have been successful. Others have stirred controversy.
Last spring, district officials enthusiastically tried to make what they saw as better use of an outdoor fitness center at North Avenue Beach.
The center offered exercise equipment for several years before district officials recommended awarding a contract to the Lincoln Park Athletic Club, which wanted to add rock-climbing at North Avenue and create similar fitness centers with rock-climbing at Montrose and 31st Street beaches.
Neighborhood residents and park activists objected to the proposed fees for the club’s activities, and particularly to the rock-climbing walls, and the club withdrew its bid.
Park officials and some outdoors enthusiasts were disappointed, but park advocates were pleased that a private club was stopped from making use of the lakefront.
Rehabbing and beautifying
Along with trying to meet the changing desires of Chicagoans, the Park District has tried to rehab its facilities and beautify the city’s parks.
In the early 1990s, the district and the city of Chicago went on a planting binge, buying so many trees, for example, that experts say the price of planting a maple in a yard from northeastern Indiana to Milwaukee has shot up.
“Except in a few places in Lincoln Park and downtown, the parks never had gardens in them,” Ald. Smith said.
“We’ve really never had flowers in the neighborhood parks before, and that’s perhaps most symbolic of the changes.”
Along with greener vistas in parks have come expansions of many neighborhood parks and the acquisition of land for new ones.
Doig also has made it a priority to work with other city agencies, such as the Chicago Housing Authority. The district and the CHA collaborated on Mandrake Park, 901 E. Pershing Rd., which was completed last year. Also, one of the longest-planned and biggest renovation projects has some lakefront residents up in arms and others waiting impatiently.
For years, Chicago government and Park District officials pushed to get the funding for the Army Corps of Engineers to redo miles of the city’s lakefront seawalls, known as revetments. In 1996, the $265 million project received congressional approval for $205 million in federal funds. City officials sang Washington’s praises. But when the seawalls began going up along the north and south lakefront, residents quickly began complaining that the walls block lake views.
The renovation of Promontory Point in Hyde Park still is mired in controversy, with residents trying to get the Park District to agree to reuse the pitted limestone that has held back Lake Michigan’s waves for years.
But the district is going ahead with another facet of the lakefront renovation plan, one that will add the first new beaches in Chicago since 1957, between 31st Street and Oakwood Boulevard (3946 south). Young people up and down the lakefront already flock to the area because of a skateboard park that was built in 2000.
Get involved, activists say
To Smith, what the conflicts over park use and changes in the Park District boil down to is the need for people to get involved in working with the district, to better let parks officials know what Chicagoans really want.
The best way, she and longtime park activists say, is for people to become involved in a local park advisory council, and keep informed about what the district is doing in neighborhood parks. Although Silberman and others complain the district sometimes makes plans without first soliciting enough community input, Smith said she believes Doig sincerely wants to make sure everyone’s voice is heard.
“People are suddenly finding that they’d better become involved in their advisory council,” she said.
District officials “want the Park District advisory councils to partner with them, rather than just be advisory,” Smith added. “One way is to set some goals, for their specific areas, and to assist with attaining those goals.”
