Just to be sure I was remembering correctly, I went Wednesday afternoon to have another look at the north end of Grant Park — the battleground over the Chicago Children’s Museum.
Mayor Richard Daley is a major proponent of the effort to relocate the museum there, as you probably know. And neighborhood residents led by their alderman, open-space advocates and editorial boards are standing in opposition.
The city’s Plan Commission will consider the proposal Thursday in what’s likely to be a contentious hearing. You’d think, from all the to-do, that the fight is over some gorgeous meadow, some undeveloped oasis that realizes the 172-year-old founding vision of Grant Park as “forever open, clear and free of any buildings or other obstruction whatever.”
But, in fact, no. As I correctly remembered from previous visits, the portion of Grant Park now at issue is a patchwork of sidewalks, steps, walls and tennis courts featuring playground equipment, a skating surface and a field house along with trees and gardens and lawns.
It’s pleasant enough, don’t get me wrong. But it’s neither open, clear nor free of obstructions and hasn’t been for some time.
The Art Institute of Chicago, the Petrillo Music Shell, the 50-foot towers of the Crown Fountain, the Pritzker Pavilion, the Harris Theater … I need not go on. The ship sailed long ago on the notion of Grant Park as downtown’s pastoral front lawn — a “common” as the city’s canal commissioners decreed in 1836.
So the fight isn’t about precedent either. Nor, given the relative inaccessibility of the disputed site to most Chicagoans, is it about the rights of a significant number of city residents to continue to enjoy a particular segment of parkland.
So what’s the fight about?
Sure, there are good questions about what increased traffic will do to the neighborhood, whether the structure will be suitably low-slung and aesthetic, and whether there aren’t smarter locations in the city for the Children’s Museum.
But these are the sorts of good questions entertained in any debate on new uses of public land. And most of us — let’s be honest now — don’t get particularly engaged or riled up about such debates unless we feel we’ll be personally affected.
Does it really matter to you whether the Chicago Children’s Museum will have enough natural light? If it’s close to the “L”? Whether there’s one more obstruction in a lightly used portion of a cluttered north end of Grant Park?
It doesn’t to me.
But what does matter to me — and what must account for the vehemence and volume of the opposition from so many quarters — is how Daley-backed plans have proceeded, again, with so little regard for the public’s wishes.
The mayor bulldozed Meigs Field without asking us. Made Soldier Field look like a spaceship from the outside without considering our input. Surrounded our neighborhood parks with wrought-iron fences and filled our medians with gargantuan flower pots without inquiring if that’s what we wanted. And on and on.
Objections were futile. But here, somehow, seems to be a critical mass of forces capable of shattering the invincibility of mayoral whim.
My look around Grant Park’s north end confirmed what my memory suggested: For most of us — including the mayor, I suspect — this fight is not about a museum in a park. It’s about who gets a real voice in the future about museums and parks.
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