Angry White People

Much of the political divide in this nation right now is focused between two distinct groups, angry white people, and everybody else. This subject has gotten a lot of attention lately after the recent departure of Tucker Carlson from FOX "News". In his role over there, Carlson as you probably know, cast himself in the role of chief defender, spokesperson and provocateur for tens of millions of angry white Americans.

On his show he typically addressed his devoted viewers as "YOU." That "you" was a means to distinguish his followers, or as Carlson put it, "Legacy Americans", from THEY, everyone who is not an angry white person.

Typical Tuckerisms include: 

• THEY'RE coming after YOU,
  
• THEY'RE taking your rights away from YOU, and most sinister of all: 
• THEY hate YOU.

Unfortunately Carlson is not alone in riling up white people,. The machines that drive both sides of the ideological divide in this country from politicians, members of the press, pundits and other public figures, to lowly bloggers such as myself, in our words and deeds, only exacerbate that anger, further dividing the country. 

So why are so many white people so angry? Google that question and you'll find all sorts of explanations, some logical, some let's just say, far reaching.

Here in Chicago and in several comparable American cities, there is a complicated historical force at work that contributes to white rage.

I've been thinking about it since I wrote this piece twelve years ago about a South Side Chicago Roman Catholic parish that closed its doors largely because of so called "white flight" from the neighborhood as black people moved in. That piece continues to be one of the most viewed posts on this blog. It struck a nerve as it has received by far the greatest number of negative comments of anything I have ever written.

I tried to be balanced in my assessment of why white people have historically moved out of neighborhoods in Chicago as soon as black people moved in. In the piece I cited institutional policies and greedy individuals who took advantage of people's fear, all of which contributed to white flight. Then I said: 

It would be easy to make a blanket condemnation of white people picking up stakes and leaving their neighborhood based on the threat of change...

Yet, next to our children, the biggest investment most of us have is our home. As much as we all would like to be community minded, the bottom line is that most of us need to look out for ourselves and our families first. "Get out before it's too late and you lose your investment..." may not be the most altruistic or public-spirited advice, but one certainly cannot say that it is not prudent.

I went into more detail in my recent post on West Garfield Park about housing covenants, redlining, contract selling, and other

...pernicious discriminatory practices that all but guaranteed segregation in the city and second-class status to people of color.

Despite taking the blame of white flight largely off the shoulders of most (but not all) average white homeowners, some folks reading the piece still took issue when I wrote that in addition to all those things I just mentioned, racism was also part of the mix.

I stand by that statement.

But here's the thing, there's racism, then there's racism. One type of racism leads people to dress up in white sheets, give Nazi salutes, and march with tiki torches while chanting "we will not be replaced." The other is nuanced and from my experience, to some extent lives in all of us. If someone tells you he "doesn't have a racist bone in his body", rest assured he either lacks the self-awareness to recognize it or is flat out lying to you.

For good reason, "Racist" in our society is one of the most devastating accusations that can be leveled against a person, as people by nature associate the word with the former, the unequivocal, un-nuanced, heil-Hitler form of racism.

But today, the word is thrown about with such reckless abandon, especially by the Left, that it has virtually lost its meaning, but not its offense. 

Another term that needs to be judiciously reconsidered is "white privilege."

There's privilege, then there's privilege. The former comes through access to money, higher education and personal connections, among other things.  The latter privilege is something that should be enjoyed by everyone who lives in a free society. Unfortunately, far too many of us, especially people of color, are often denied many of those privileges. Therefore, "white privilege" which for the record I believe is a real thing, is not something bestowed upon white people, but rather, something that is taken away from others.  

Yet like racism, the word privilege evokes a very specific image to most people.

Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, heir to the TV Dinner fortune, is undisputedly a man of great privilege in every sense of the word. The vast majority of his audience which is mostly white, does not enjoy the kind of privilege Carlson and the proverbial one percent of Americans have, and never will. 

Since Carlson is nothing if not two-faced, it's difficult to know exactly who he is or what he really believes. Judging from his public words, and now his publicly distributed private words, Carlson is likely also a racist in every sense of the word.  I'll go out on a limb here and state that the same is probably not true of much of his audience, although I haven't a clue how much. 

I read two books in preparation for my recent post about the Chicago neighborhood of West Garfield Park. The first was: Redlined: A Memoir of Race, Change, and Fractured Community in 1960s Chicago, by Linda Gartz. Gartz writes about growing up in the West Side neighborhood where both she and her father spent their formative years. Linda's formative years coincided with the drastic population shift of the community which went from virtually 100 percent white in 1950, to virtually 100 percent black in 1970.

In 1968, the neighborhood was hit particularly hard during the riots that took place after the assassination of Martin Luther King. In the subsequent decades, between 1970 and 2020, West Garfield Park lost nearly two thirds of its population. Unlike the vast majority of their fellow white West Garfield Parkers, Gartz's family remained, at least as landlords, (they moved out in 1965). As the buildings around theirs crumbled due to vandalism and neglect, Gartz's parents dedicated themselves to the upkeep of their three properties and faithful service to their tenants for the rest of their lives. (They died in the nineties).

Linda Gartz pulls no punches when describing some of the shortcomings of her family, including her mother's initial response to a black family moving to her block. But she also describes her mom's change of heart as she got to know some of her new neighbors.

Simply put, the message of the book is that both black and white families in West Garfield Park and other similar communities around the city, were the victims of bad actors, both government and businesses who profited off anger and fear of the white people, and the limited options for black people. The other message is that if we only could get to know one another on a personal basis, maybe we could begin to learn to live together.

That last point is also one of the messages of Vanishing Eden: White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Racially Changing City. The book was written by Michael T. Maly and Heather M. Dalmage, two professors of sociology at Roosevelt University. The book is based upon Dalmage and Maly's interviews of white folks whose families moved away from the neighborhoods in which they grew up when they began to change racially, and the two sociologists' take on them.

In all the interviews, the subjects spoke with reverence for the neighborhoods their parents felt compelled to leave. These places are described, as the book's title implies, as virtual paradises, places where everyone knew, cared for and looked out for one another, where the only limitation placed upon kids was to be home as soon as the streetlights came on. 

This all hit home for me as I have similar idyllic memories of my life growing up in Humboldt Park, a couple miles from West Garfield Park. We left the community in 1968 when I was nine, not long after the West Side riots, for the suburb of Oak Park. 

Many of the negative comments to the post mentioned above, implied that as an outsider, I had no idea what I was talking about and had no right to criticize others who experienced something I had not. I pointed out that I did indeed have "skin in the game", bringing up my Humboldt Park experience. 

At one point in reading Vanishing Eden however, it dawned on me that I was being disingenuous. In describing the factors leading people to change neighborhoods, the authors distinguished between being pulled away or pushed away.  

A few weeks ago, I asked my mother what was the factor that made her and my father decide to leave the neighborhood in which she had lived for nearly thirty years. She told me about an incident that took place while she was walking to the corner store, (a classic example of the bygone days). On her way, someone spit on her from a second-floor window. "That was it.." she said, "we were out of there." OK my mother doesn't talk like that, but you get the picture. 

Thinking about it however, that incident, unpleasant as it was, was not the reason we left Humboldt Park. We left because we were living in a small rental apartment in a residential hotel building in which my grandmother was the manager. Both my parents had good jobs, both had cars, and money to afford to buy a house in the suburbs. In other words, they were acting out the "American Dream" just like the vast majority of their peers at the time. Long story short, we would have moved regardless, the spitting incident only hastened the act. 

In contrast, the families of the people interviewed in Vanishing Eden for the most part had already realized the "American Dream" of owning a home. Many were working class folks who had to save and sacrifice for years to achieve that goal and once there, had no intention of giving it up. Had external forces not intervened pushing them out of their beloved homes, they or their descendants might still be there.

Naturally there was great bitterness once their neighborhood changed. As I pointed out in the West Garfield Park piece, most of these folks knew nothing about the bad actors Linda Gartz speaks of in her book. What they knew was what they saw with their own eyes: time and again, once a neighborhood in Chicago went from white to black, it deteriorated rapidly. Given that, it's not too hard to figure who they came to blame.

In her book, Linda Gartz mentions that growing up, she and her family knew no black people personally. While I didn't have a great deal of close contact with black people as a small child either, one of the most memorable persons from my life in Humboldt Park was the contracted painter in our building, a black man by the name of Rogers. As my grandma ran the hotel, I got to know all the people who had a stake in the building from the owners to the janitor. Honestly I liked them all, but Rogers was especially kind to me, and I'd say he and I were as close to being genuine friends as a grown man of thirty-something and an eight-year-old child possibly could be.

Further background in my development, I have no childhood memory of my parents ever making a disparaging remark about black people. In fact, as I pointed out in this space at least a couple times, after I reported to them some nasty racial comments made by the parents of my best friend at the time, my parents told me in no uncertain terms that my friend's parents were wrong. As my father would always say: "people are people." I will forever be grateful for that.

It wasn't until we moved to Oak Park that I experienced virulent racism.  It was tough entering a new school in fifth grade where virtually all the kids had known each other since kindergarten. I met a kid in my class who seemed nice enough. He was smart and would actually talk to me without condescension. It turns out that he too was a new kid at the school, also having recently moved from the West Side. One day in the playground much to my surprise, he told me he and his family were moving again. When I asked why he said "because nig--rs moved onto our block and there's no way in hell we're going to live with them." Even at my young age I understood that while they came out of this ten year old boy's mouth, those weren't his words. 

Perhaps he was one of the people interviewed by Professors Maly and Dalmage for their book. Some of the interviewees while not being that candid about their feelings, were quite brazen by today's standards about expressing their bitterness and distrust of black people. One particularly disgusting excerpt is a couple recounting something that took place after moving to a new, all-white neighborhood. They were having a garage sale and a couple of black teenagers from another neighborhood bought a bicycle from them. As they walked through the alley with their new bike, a couple of neighbors who were cops chased after the kids and jumped them, assuming they had stolen the bike. The most disturbing part is that in recounting the story years later, the couple telling it were laughing, finding the whole incident amusing. 

Vanishing Eden is a revealing book, not only in the attitudes of its subjects, but also the attitudes of the authors, whose own bias comes through clearly.

The first clue comes from the book's cover illustration which features a faded photograph appearing to have been made in the fifties of a smiling white boy, three or four years old, sitting in a Radio Flyer wagon in the midst of what appears to be a tidy neighborhood of modest post-war homes. With the exception of the social class depicted, this picture evokes "Leave it to Beaver" and other period pieces that represent to many, a time of lost innocence in this country, all made possible in their minds by white hegemony.

The subtitle of the book: "White Construction of Memory, Meaning, and Identity in a Radically Changing City" drives home the point that the book's creators don't hold that opinion, and the photograph gracing the cover is there for irony.

In the book they make the point that their subjects view their old neighborhoods through rose colored glasses. To them, before the change everything was perfect and after, everything went to hell. 

Had they interviewed me about my own childhood experience of Humboldt Park, I would have told them pretty much the same thing, except the going to hell part.

The truth is I spent my formative years in Oak Park. I made some of my most cherished friendships there including my oldest and dearest friend, also an emigre from the West Side. I have no such connection to Humboldt Park. In Oak Park I had a back yard and a basement where I had nearly full reign, in addition to my bedroom. Three doors away there was a lovely park where I learned to play tennis. In the winter I went skating and sledding. For all intents and purposes, the "quality" of my life improved exponentially after we moved there. I am who I am today, for better or worse, by virtue of my life in Oak Park. 

Yet moving away from Humboldt Park was traumatic for me as things I dearly loved, my friends and the only home I knew, were taken away. Today I have no bad memories of my life in Humboldt Park, even though bad things certainly happened there. For years I mourned losing it and went back every chance I could. Despite there being no rational explanation for it, to this day I still feel in some ways more connected to Humboldt Park than Oak Park. 

Memory is a funny thing.

It's not surprising to me that folks who left their childhood homes around the same time I did, would have similar memories. It's even less surprising that they would express bitterness had they felt pushed out of their old neighborhood, especially if that idea was constantly enforced by the people closest to them.

Not many of the subjects in Vanishing Eden come off looking as horrible as the ones I mentioned above. Most of them, forty and more years after the fact (the book was published in 2016), understand the dynamics of race in this country and realize that black people themselves aren't to blame for what happened to their communities. But the authors in no way let these folks off the hook as they all in one way or other, express understanding for their fellow white folks, usually family members, who feel more bitter than they do, thereby "excusing their racism" as the authors put it.  

Thumbing through the book it's difficult to find a page where either the word racism or the term white privilege is not found. The authors are correct in pointing out that many white people who experienced white flight to this day have no intention of living on the same block as a black person Somehow, they weren't able to come up with any white flight veterans who had no problem living with black people. 

I wonder why.

They could have asked Linda Gartz. Perhaps the most revealing part of her book is where she mentions how during the civil rights movement of the sixties, her parents sympathized with the plight of black people in American South. That feeling didn't extend to the blacks who were moving into their neighborhood. This NIMBY (not in my backyard) attitude is not unusual, it's one of the less flattering parts of human nature.

On the same token, it's completely understandable why white people who experienced making the difficult decision of moving out of a changing neighborhood, would feel put off being judged by other white people who had no such experience. I imagine it would be doubly irritating for working class folks to have people with more money, education and influence, people who could afford to live anywhere they pleased, including affluent predominantly white suburbs, accuse them of racism and exercising their "white privilege", just for wanting their families to be able to live in peace and safety.

I don't know the personal backgrounds of Professors Dalmage and Maly. From their profile photographs, they appear to both be white. I can't say if either had the experience of living in a racially changing neighborhood. Dalmage was born in the mid-sixties and Maly in the eighties making them both too young, especially Maly, to have experienced the height of the era of white flight.  

It's clear they have an agenda, not a misguided one, reminding us that we'd all be better off if we learned how to get to know one another. Where they err in my opinion, is they make the same mistake they accuse their subjects of, they lack a sense of empathy. 

In my piece on the baseball player Ty Cobb, I embedded a powerful interview with the great Negro League ballplayer, coach, manager, and historian John "Buck" O'Neil. In that interview, O'Neil refuses to condemn people for being racists. Everybody has their own mountain to climb he suggests. "Babies aren't born prejudiced", O'Neil said, someone had to teach them to be that way.

Had Rogers and other good people like him not entered my life, had I spent my first years in West Garfield Park rather than Humboldt Park, had we not moved to Oak Park allowing me to meet the amazing people who would become my lifelong friends... 

Had a slew of other things that happened by chance in my life making me who I am today not happened, and most of all, had I not had parents who set me straight and taught me that the most important lesson in life is that "people are people", my outlook on the world may have been very different.

Had things been different, I too may have ended up being an angry white guy, falling prey to bad actors like the neighborhood busters, Tucker Carlson and the rest, teaching me to fear and distrust anyone who is different from me.

"There but by the grace of God go I" they say.

I think everyone of good will needs to keep that in mind.

A Walk in the Park

The brouhaha surrounding the Lucas Museum makes it easy to forget that the mission of the so-called "elitist" organization, Friends of the Parks, doesn't end at the lakefront. Rather, Friends of the Parks advocates a commitment to and the preservation of the parks and open spaces throughout the entire Chicago area.

The industrial ruins and decaying residential neighborhoods of the west side are the last place you might expect to find the crown jewel of Chicago's storied park system. But there it sits at the intersection of Central Park Boulevard and Lake Street, Garfield Park and its magnificent Conservatory.

Before the Great Fire of 1871, architect and engineer Willam Le Baron Jenney was hired by the commission who oversaw the parks on Chicago's west side to lay out plans for three major landscape parks and the boulevards to connect them. Jenny is most famous for having designed the first multi-story commercial building whose interior metal skeleton would support the outside wall, or in pure Chicago parlance, the world's first skyscraper. Fourteen years before the Home Insurance Building opened, the parks Jenny laid out would become Humboldt Park on the north. Douglas Park on the south, and appropriately enough, Central Park in between. Central Park would get a new name in 1881 after the assassination of the 20th president of the United States, James Garfield.

A tiny bit of the landscape of the Garfield Park community peaking though
the lush plants of the tropical house of the Conservatory.

One might consider Humboldt, Garfield and Douglas Parks and their connecting boulevards to constitute one greater park, much as you would the south side Jackson and Washington Parks and Midway Plaisance, the wide swath of park and boulevard that connects the two. The idea of a Chicago boulevard system creating a ring of parks that would connect the city and the lakefront goes all the way back to the 1840s and was the brainchild of one John S. Wright, an early real estate speculator and developer. Alas politics and the economy got in the way as they usually do, and no action was taken until the idea was picked up upon by the Chicago Times newspaper who in 1866 published a plan of a park system "one quarter mile wide and fourteen miles long" that would encircle the existing city starting at the northernmost part of the Chicago lake shore and ending at the southernmost.

The three west side parks of Jenny's would be among the first sections of the boulevard system to be realized. Unlike today's emphasis on recreation, the west side parks were designed with the typically mid-nineteenth century principle that parks were intended first and foremost to be a relief from the city, in the words of Lewis Mumford, they provided "refuge against the soiled and bedraggled works of man's creation."

Jenny's west side parks did just that. Curving carraige paths and walkways contrasted sharply with Chicago's practical but relentless street grid. Berms and strategically planed flora would wall off the everyday functions of the city from the parks' interiors. Quite the contrast from the typical architecture found in the city, the parks were filled with fanciful, ornate buildings that served as bandstands, conservatories, observation towers and field houses. The limited area set aside for the west side parks inspired Jenny and his associates to import species of plants from all over the world to make up for less than promising land features. Most of all, Jenny's liberal use of water, especially in Humboldt and Douglas Parks resulted in over fifty percent of their respective areas comprised of lagoons and small rivers.

Some of Jenny's plans were realized but yet again, fate, the economy, and a trait at which Chicago particularly excels, political corruption, all got in the way. It would take a scrupulous laborer from Denmark who had a particular talent in horticulture to see the project through to its completion. Along the way, Jens Jensen would become one of the most influential landscape philosophers and architects of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It's well known that Jensen began his career in Chicago as a laborer in Humboldt Park then quickly made his way up the ladder to become park supervisor. Just as quickly, he lost that job because he wouldn't play along with the "Chicago way." Soon bygones became bygones and Jensen found himself as the director of the West Parks as well as their chief architect. Jensen, who came to love the prairie landscape of his adopted home, the American Midwest, was a strict advocate of using only native species in his plantings. Unlike his predecessors and many of his peers, Jensen did not believe you could improve upon nature.

"A great Midwestern haystack" The southern facade of the Garfield Park Conservatory

Slowly but surely, Jensen transformed the Humboldt, Garfield, Douglas trifecta into a glorious reflection and tribute to the landscape in which we inhabit. Gone were many of the trappings of Victoriana including the exotic buildings and more exotic flora, replaced by Prairie Style buildings and plantings. Jensen was not only a great landscape architect but he knew his way around a building as well. He designed the current Garfield Park Conservatory along the same principles of adherence to regional influence as his philosophy of planting. In an interesting contrast to the Lincoln Park Conservatory which looks like it could have been plucked straight out of nineteenth century London, Jensen's building, according to Julia Bachrach, author of The City in a Garden: A Photographic History of Chicago's Parks, is designed "to emulate the simple form of a great Midwestern haystack."

Throughout his career, Jensen had an on again off again relationship with Chicago and the West Park Commission. (The Chicago Park District which consolidated the many different park commissions in the city was not organized until 1934.) During one of those off again times, the baroque style  "Gold Dome Building" was built in 1928 to be the headquarters of the West Park Commission. After the establishment of the CPD, it would become the park's field house. Surely Jensen hated it, despite the fact that it and its eponymous dome are enduring symbols of the Garfield Park neighborhood that has to put it mildly, had its ups and downs over the years.

The Conservatory too has had its ups and downs, but in the last dozen years or so, much effort has been put into its restoration and today, despite being slightly off the beaten path, is one of the premier cultural institutions of this city.

Certainly in my lifetime and perhaps since it was built in 1908, the conservatory and its environs have never looked better. Most recently, several acres of land directly to the west of the conservatory were turned into The City Garden. 

Bridge spanning the vast lily pond of The City Garden.

As the newest public garden in Chicago, The City Garden, much like the great Palmisano Park on the site of a former limestone quarry in Bridgeport, embraces the industrial landscape surrounding it rather than walling it out. Built upon land that once was the site of tennis courts and a wading pool, The City Garden, according to the Garfield Park Conservatory website,

takes urban greening as its guiding principle, and it gives expression to that principle at multiple levels, from its structure to its materials and plantings. It also provides an important link in an ever-growing lacework of boulevards, gardens, and open spaces scattered beyond its borders.

City Garden in front of reminders of the west side of Chicago's industrial past

It is a little disconcerting to hear the rumbling of the L as you stroll through the multiple "garden communities" of The City Garden, including a grove of hawthorn trees supposedly planted by none other than Jens Jensen. But as Elwood Blues told his brother Jake when he spent the night at his place whose open window was about ten feet from the extremely busy Loop elevated structure, "you get used to it."

Although not as well known nor understood as Chicago's commercial and residential architectural history, Chicago has a distinguished history of landscape architecture. The legacy of Jenny, Jensen, Frederick Law Olmsted, Calvert Vaux, Alfred Caldwell and others, is one we can be proud of, one worth caring for. The City Garden, the Conservatory, Garfield Park and its sister parks Humboldt and Douglas, remain treasures to behold, no small effort, thanks in part to the tireless efforts of groups like Friends of the Parks.

Thanks folks for a job well done.

First Visit to The 606

Two of the thousands of visitors stroll the new 606 Trail on its inaugural day, Saturday, June 6, 2015

On its opening day, my son and I visited the 606 Trail, the new path created from the remnants of the old Bloomingdale spur line on the west side of Chicago. The weather could not have been more beautiful and by all accounts, the event which combined performances, art exhibitions, gardening workshops, processions, and thousands of individuals upon their bikes, skateboards, rollerblades or just their feet, came off without a hitch as far as I could tell.

Time constraints prevented us from visiting the entire trail, so we limited ourselves to the western third, from Humboldt Boulevard to the western boundary at Ridgeway Avenue.

Bloomingdale Line Viaduct over Humboldt Boulevard,
one block from the Humboldt Park home where I spent the first ten years of my life. 

Benches at the Humboldt Boulevard Overpass

Street fair, Humboldt Boulevard

Tributes to Pedro Albízu Campos, Roberto Clemente and Julia de Burgos
at her eponymous park

Carnival celebration at Julia de Burgos Park

Trail map, this one at Kedzie Avenue

A new perspective on life in the 'hood,
a bird's eye view of dangling shoes from a lamppost. 

Poplar Grove near the western boundary of the trail.

Part of the industrial character of the Bloomingdale Line celebrated by the new 606 Trail

The Exelon Observatory at the western boundary of the trail

Much of the real estate of the 606 Trail is devoted to bike paths, pedestrians are restricted to the blue strips..

Apartment dwellers along 606 will no doubt be drawing their curtains more than they did in the past.

I ran into a friend from work on the trail. He told me that he saw two well-dressed women taking verbal notes of the property adjacent to the trail's western edge, brazenly pointing out which properties they would tear down, which they would spare, and which they would convert to condos. This clearly would confirm the nightmare scenario of the 606 contributing to skyrocketing property values in the neighborhoods surrounding especially the western half of the trail, forcing many longtime residents out of their neighborhood.

Walking around those neighborhoods, it's quite clear that the change has already begun as the re-purposing of old properties mixed with new construction dots the area. The 606 Trail may indeed be a conduit for re-gentrification but more likely it will just hasten the inevitable as the neighborhoods of Humboldt Park are already changing.

Depending upon the way things work out, it remains to be seen if the photographs below will represent soon to be lost Chicago...

Let's hope not, it's the very mixture of cultures that exemplifies the neighborhoods that surround the 606 Trail today, that makes the city such a vital place.

The 606

My old neighborhood of Humboldt Park is in the news again.

This coming Saturday, June 6 to be exact, a new park, actually several of them connected by a trail will open in Chicago. Officially called The 606 Trail (after the three digits of Chicago's zip code), the system of parks was built along an old railroad spur that ran along Bloomingdale Avenue, two blocks north of North Avenue. The trail will run approximately three miles, from Ridgeway Avenue on the west, to Ashland on the east. In its day, the spur serviced several light industrial complexes that were built adjacent to it.

As a child I lived on Humboldt and Cortland, one block north of the railroad line. Even back in the sixties, it was somewhat rare to see trains rumble over its tracks. Despite Humboldt being zoned a residential boulevard, beside the Bloomingdale line there were two good sized businesses, a cartage company on the west side of the boulevard, and a glass company on the east. Bordering the playground of my elementary school a block away was the Acme Casket Company whose windowless north wall was perfectly suited as the backstop for our games of fast pitch.

It's structures like these, or the remnants of them, that the users of the new 606 Trail will pass as they stroll, hike, jog or bike along its paths. Much like the park built upon the site of the old Stearns Quarry in Bridgeport, now called Palmisano Park, the new trail takes advantage of the old industrial landscape it is built upon, rather than obscuring it. This is clearly NOT your grandfather's park. As you might imagine, the trail/park is not for everyone.

I for one, can't be more excited about its opening. As pointed out in the video accompanying Blair Kamin's piece about the 606, the trail is elevated only fifteen feet, but in a city as flat as Chicago, that height makes a difference. The view along the trail will be completely new to residents of this city, (except for railroad workers and those who snuck onto the tracks for whatever reason). It passes through portions of this city that are often overlooked, namely the industrial backbone that drove this city for over a century. Much of that backbone been lost due to changing economies and technologies, but I'm sure the stroll along the 606, if one pays attention, will enlighten the visitor on how cities change and reinvent themselves. Even the peeling paint of those old fast pitch strike zones on the sides of decaying buildings will have a story or two to tell.

Supporters of the project boast about the positive impact the trail will have upon the property values in the communities it transverses. But that's a double edged sword; good news for working property owners, bad news for renters who will face rent increases, home owners on fixed incomes who will face property tax hikes, and in this particular case, ethnic groups who are sensitive to the dilution of their numbers as a result of residents being priced out of their neighborhoods. The trail will provide a pedestrian highway from the transformed, up-scale neighborhoods of Wicker Park and Bucktown on the east, to the lower income neighborhoods comprising the community of Humboldt Park on the west. As we saw with the neighborhood objections to a large music festival in Humboldt Park, the new influx of well-heeled visitors from the re-gentrified east may not be welcomed with open arms by all the residents of the communities to the yet-to-be-re-gentrified west.

It's anybody's guess how this will all play out, my guess is the trail will contribute to the change that has been going on in these communities for the past generation. In other words it will be good for some, not so good for others, but in the end it will hopefully attract people, interest and investment into a community that sorely needs it.

Will Humboldt Park lose its soul because of the changes that have been taking place? I think my friend Francis Morrone brilliantly addresses that question in this editorial piece that appears in today's New York Daily News. His article is about New York but it applies to Chicago as well.

As I've stated in this space before, the only constant you can depend upon in a living, breathing city, is change.

Chicago's new park will reflect and be a direct part of that change at the same time, which is both exciting and terrifying.

That's what life in the big city is all about, isn't it?


Here is a link to the mission statement of the lead artist of the 606 project, Frances Whitehead.

Humboldt Park, again

From DNA Chicago, here is a piece about the conception and building of the Humboldt Park inland beach that the Chicago Park District has decided not to open this year. You'll find within that piece, a link to an article from the Chicago Tribune, dated June 10, 1973 describing the plans for the conversion of the century old lagoon into a beach, as well as a photograph showing the dredging of the lagoon to make way for the beach. 

I remember it well. My family left Humboldt Park in 1968, but on ocasion my father and I still visited the park where we used to spend our Sunday afternoons together.

We paid a visit as the dredging work was underway. It was a scene that nearly broke my heart. As the water was drained from the lagoon, neighborhood residents were invited to harvest the thousands of fish who once inhabited the lagoon. In a scene that could best be described as resembling Sebastio Salgado's photographs of the mines of Serra Pelada in Brazil, hundreds of individuals, covered head to toe in mud, plodded through the former bed of the lagoon, plucking the helpless fish, mostly carp, out of the remaining puddles of water in which they were stranded. The fish not "lucky" enough to find a small pocket of water to briefly keep them alive, suffocated as they lay in the mud. The sight, smell and pathos of the scene is something I will never forget.

For my father and me, it was the end of Humboldt Park as we knew it; I don't recall the two of us ever visiting it again together.

According to the DNA Chicago piece, the new beach was an instant success, drawing up to 20,000 on peak days, flying in the face of my memories of having never seen more than a handful of people using the facility. Mayor Richard J. Daley promised that more beaches similar to Humboldt Park's would be built, but in the end, only one came to be, that one in Douglas Park, another west side park that is virtually the mirror image of Humboldt. That beach closed sometime in the 1990s with little fanfare.

The article implies that City Hall broke its promise to the city by not building more of the inland beaches. As I pointed out in my previous post, an inland beach is a tremendously expensive venture, as well as environmentally unsound and destructive to the historical integrity of the parks where they would have been built. As the seventies, the nadir for historical preservation came to a close, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the idea of building these inland beaches in our historic parks, lost its appeal.

In my opinion, we can be thankful for that.

Much of the strong sentiment for keeping the Humboldt Park beach open comes from the fact that building it in the first place was a hard fought battle waged by the Puerto Rican community who still has strong ties to the park and the neighborhood, despite the re-gentrification that has been taking place for the last generation.

There has been resistance to the changes going on in the community. One recent effort has been the successful eviction of an annual event called Riot Fest, a Punk Music festival and carnival that has taken place for the last three years in Humboldt Park. Last year, rainy weather combined with record crowds took their toll on the park. The organizers of the traveling festival held in several cities across the country, agreed to pay the city for the cleanup of the park to the tune of $182,000.

The opposition to Riot Fest led by Alderman Robert Maldonado and a group calling itself Humboldt Park Citizens Against Riot Fest, cited the festival's taking over virtually the entire park for their activities.

Charlie Billups, a spokesman for the citizen's action group said:

We cannot allow big corporations that are making a lot of money to have blanket access to the parks.

The group also cited "ecological damage to the park" as another of its grievances.

In an attempt to ingratiate the folks who wanted them out, the producers of Riot Fest offered to contribute $30,000 toward the effort to keep the Humboldt Park Beach open.

The opponents of the festival weren't moved by the offer (30K being a mere drop in the bucket compared to the one million dollar annual upkeep for the beach) and last week, it was announced that the festival will be moved to Douglas Park.

Although they overstate the ecological damage, I entirely agree with the citizen group's concerns about the festival taking over the park in mid-September, both for the event itself, then the subsequent cleanup time. Despite the indisputable money the festival brings into the community, it is simply wrong to close off a public park to accommodate a privately sponsored event that charges admission for the privilege of entering the park.

Unfortunately some of the community's objections to Riot Fest are troubling. It is understandable that the Puerto Rican community has concerns that many of its members are being priced out of Humboldt Park neighborhoods. Along those lines, there have been comments that imply that much of the objection from the community toward Riot Fest has to do with the fact that it attracts non-Puerto Ricans to the park.

This quote is taken off a Facebook post from a group (or possibly an individual) calling itself "Chicago Puerto Rican Community":

Now that the Riot fest has been taken out of Humboldt Park those in heavy favor of the fest lashed out and said that Humboldt Park is not Puerto Rican and even threaten to have our alderman kicked out in favor of someone that will side with those that want Puerto Ricans Gone. (emphasis mine)

The Puerto Rican community certainly has left its mark on the neighborhood. Totems of la comunidad Boriqua were erected on Division Street (which runs through the park) in the form of two enormous sculptures a half mile apart representing the Puerto Rican flag. The street between the sculptures has been dubbed Paseo Boriqua. In a couple weeks following a parade downtown, a huge festival commemorating Puerto Rican Day will fill Humboldt Park as it has for nearly forty years. The Institute of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture is housed in the park's ornate Stables and Receptory Building.

Humboldt Park unquestionably remains the heart of Chicago's Puerto Rican community.

In my previous post, I described the annual Polish Constitution Day Parade that ended up in Humboldt Park at the base of the statue of Tadeusz Kościuszko where a huge celebration took place. For many years, Humboldt Park was the center of Chicago's Polonia. Before that it was the heart of other communities as testified by the monuments and institutions in and around the park. The Norwegian American Hospital, where I was born, borders the park. The apartment building and immediate neighborhood where my mother lived between 1940 and 1968 were predominantly Jewish. The church down the block where my son and I were both baptized was built by Irish Catholics. The city's most beautiful Russian Orthodox Cathedral, Holy Trinity, designed by Louis Sullivan is a few blocks east of the park as is the community known as Ukrainian Village. The park itself was named for the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and much of what we know of it was designed by a man from Denmark.

Statue of the Norse explorer Leif Ericson looking toward the East Lagoon
of Humboldt Park.
Noting the pride of the Norwegian Community who is responsible for the statue,
the boulder upon which he stands is inscribed:
"Leif Ericson, Discoverer of America."

Yet no one would have ever dreamt of calling Humboldt Park, Polish, or Norwegian, or Danish, Jewish, Irish, Russian, Ukrainian or German, even though all those groups left indelible marks on the community.

The Puerto Rican community continues to be a vital and integral part of Humboldt Park and its environs but no, Humboldt Park is NOT Puerto Rican, because no one group can legitimately claim exclusive rights to it.

Simply put, Humboldt Park, as is the case with all our public parks, belongs to everyone.

The discussion of the future of the beach, much like the discussion over Riot Fest, has been framed around the context of socio-economic justice and race. Along those lines, the inevitable rhetoric over money spent on downtown parks, (namely the new Maggie Daley Park), versus neighborhood parks has been voiced. But all this is little more than demagoguery; the real issue regarding the inland beach is finding the practical means, and a legitimate rationale to keep open an enormously expensive amenity used by relatively few people for only three months of the year.

So far, no one has come up with the dough or short of that, a credible reason to choose the beach over the other essential features of Humboldt Park. My prediction is that the beach will remain closed this summer and a potential impasse between the community and the Park District will keep the twenty acres of Humboldt Park devoted to the beach, drained and useless to anyone for the foreseeable future.

The only winners in that scenario would be a handful of activists who will claim bragging rights for having stood up to the Park District.

If that happens, it would be a terrible waste of a precious resource.

Humboldt's Folly

The Humboldt Park Beach as it looks nine months out of the year. 

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Take half of the Humboldt Park lagoon and transform it into an inland beach. Instead of the dangerous age-old practice of opening up fire hydrants on blistering hot days, a new beach would provide the residents of the community a safe place to get cool relief from the summer heat. It would give kids a place to go during summer vacation, keeping them off the streets and out of trouble. And in true Chicago fashion, it would be a bone to throw at a community that was growing impatient about being ignored and disenfranchised.

My mother wasn't buying any of it. A resident of the Humboldt Park community since 1940, my mom had a great fondness for the park, its history and its beauty. Upon that lagoon she was a passenger on countless row boat rides in the summertime. She learned to skate as I did upon its frozen water in the winter. She'd stroll as a teenager, later as a mother pushing me in a stroller along the park's miles of paths along the lagoons, prairie river, and the artesian well that fed them. In her youth, the park was accessible day and night when people in the neighborhood would bring chairs, sit, and discus the affairs of the world until the wee hours. Some brave souls would even camp out all night to escape the summer heat in the days before air conditioning. Humboldt Park in the forties, still retained most of what made it one of the crown jewels of Chicago's park system.

That nighttime tradition was long gone, but another was still going strong when I arrived on the scene and lived three blocks from Humboldt Park in the sixties. A regal equestrian statue of the Polish (and American Revolutionary War) hero Tadeusz Kościuszko stood proudly near the north entrance to the park. Every year, on the Sunday closest to May 3rd, a parade would pass in front of our home on Humboldt Boulevard. It was Chicago's annual Polish Constitution Day parade, which would terminate at the base of the Kościuszko monument. There, politicians of all ethnic stripes gathered to address the assembled throngs of Chicago's Polonia. It was at one of these celebrations, most likely in 1966 or 1967, where upon my father's shoulders, I caught my first glimpse of the ruddy complexion of Mayor Richard J. Daley, and my one and only glimpse of Senator Robert F. Kennedy who made an annual pilgrimage to the festivities in front of that magnificent 1904 statue, the work of Kasimir Chodzinski.

Polish Constitution Day festivities, Humboldt Park, 1935. The lagoon
that was replaced by the current beach is visible in the background, behind the monument.
The monument was moved to its current location on Northerly Island in 1978.
(photographer unknown)

By the seventies, much had changed. Due to neglect both from the city, and the users of the park, Humboldt Park started to become rough around the edges. Trash carelessly strewn about was not collected, park buildings were vandalized and boarded up, and the statues of Alexander von Humboldt, Leif Ericson and Kościuszko, symbols of the ethnic communities who once called Humboldt Park home, were covered in graffiti.

Eventually the park became rotten to the core as gang violence, drug deals, prostitution, and the detritus that followed them, became as much a part of the park's landscape as Jens Jensen's prairie river, the Schmidt Garden and Martin boat house/refectory and the two Edward Kemeys bison that stand guard in front of the rose garden. No one in their right mind would dare venture into the park after dark, unless they were looking for drugs, sex or trouble. To many residents of the city even to this day, the words Humboldt Park evoke danger and despair.

Part of my mother's attitude about the inland beach which was built in 1973, was just sour grapes. She re-affirmed those feelings of long ago the other day when she told me she always felt the project was unnecessary as she got along just fine growing up without a beach in Humboldt Park. Why on earth she felt, couldn't the people living there at the time do the same? After all, there were plenty of other amenities in the park, including a perfectly functioning swimming pool. If folks had the urge to stick their toes in the sand, the beaches of Lake Michigan were a just short bus ride away; heck in a pinch, you could even walk there and back as she did many times in her youth.

But I think her feelings went deeper than that. The decline of the neighborhood where she spent her formative years and beyond, hit my mother harder than she ever let on. Back when the idea of replacing the lagoon with a beach was made public, she intimated that the people in the community who did not care enough about the park to take care of it or at the very least, pick up their own trash, had no business making demands to change it. In those days as an idealistic teenager, I thought her feelings were harsh, inflexible, and mixed with a touch of intolerance toward the community. After all, the whole world had changed since 1940, not just Humboldt Park.

Restored walk along lagoon and the most iconic building of Humbolt Park,
the Boat House and Refectory, May, 2015

Like I said, to me the inland beach seemed like a good idea.

Of course at the time, I had little understanding of the history and architecture of the park. Humboldt Park and its two sister west side parks, Garfield and Douglas Parks, were laid out back in the late 1860s. Their first architect was William LeBaron Jenney, most famous for being credited, at least here in Chicago, as the father of the skyscraper. Jenny's designs for the parks, much of them never realized, were very much based around the lagoons, with water comprising up to fifty percent of the area of his plans.

The man who today is most associated with these three great parks, is Jens Jensen, a native of Denmark, whose first job in the Chicago parks was as a laborer in Humboldt Park. Through hard work and talent with all things horticultural, Jensen quickly worked his way up the ladder to become that park's superintendent, only to find himself out of a job when he refused to play along with the corrupt administrators who were running the west side parks. His unemployment didn't last long, Jensen was soon re-instated and ultimately became the superintendent of Chicago's West Park District, this in the days before the umbrella organization, the Chicago Park District, back when the city's parks were governed by several smaller administrative bodies.

Build it and they will come: planting natural flora
in a park will inevitably attract natural fauna.
Case in point, this Great blue heron looking for
his dinner in the Humboldt Park lagoon. 

Jens Jensen fell in love with the landscape of his adopted home in the American Midwest. The plans for his parks called for features that embraced the local prairie landscape rather than rejecting it as was the custom of the day. Unlike his contemporaries, Jensen did not believe that he could improve upon nature. As landscape architect, he was particularly adamant about the use of native plants and materials in his designs. Jensen described the philosophy of his art in these words:

Every plant has fitness and must be placed in its proper surroundings so as to bring out its full beauty. Therein lies the art of landscaping.

Beyond Jens Jensen's philosophical ideals of reflecting nature by using native materials, there is a pragmatism to his approach as native species require little human intervention to keep them thirving. Long before the word "sustainability" crept into the common lexicon, Jensen's landscapes with their native species of plants which attracted and sustained native species of animals, required little maintenance compared to the work of his contemporaries featuring exotic plants which required constant attention. Jensen's landscapes, literally grew themselves.

That is certainly not the case with an inland beach. When the word came out last week that the Chicago Park District does not intend to open the beach this summer, they cited the astronomical cost it takes to sustain it. Water that supplies the beach has to be continually pumped in, filtered,  and chlorinated in order to make it safe for swimmers. Unlike a swimming pool, the used water in an inland beach cannot be recycled, it all ends up in the sewer. Sand, which is imported from the Indiana Dunes also has to be continually replenished. By the Park District's estimate, the cost of sustaining the Humboldt Park inland beach is about one million dollars per year.

Simply put, an inland beach is not only ecologically unsound, but financially impractical as well,  As the terrible state of the finances of the city of Chicago and the state of Illinois force drastic cuts in the operating budgets for each park, serious choices have to be made.

Unfortunately the Chicago Park District did itself no favors with it's tactic of not publicly announcing its plans to keep the beach closed this summer. Instead they chose to keep their cards close to the vest in the hope that by keeping the issue out of sight and mind, no one would notice the fact that the beach simply wasn't going to open this year.

Well the community did notice and not surprisingly, its members were not happy.

At a public meeting, hastily convened at the Humboldt Park Fieldhouse adjacent to the beach last week, Park District officials enumerated their reasons for not opening the beach, and community members expressed their reasons to keep it open. The PD folks suggested the money could be better spent in other ways that would keep the residents of the community happy and wet. They were figuratively speaking, booed off the stage.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for a community to have something taken away from them, but the Park District has compelling reasons to shut the beach down.

I don't have numbers to back this up, but from my personal experience, the Humboldt Park Beach never seemed to be heavily used. In the considerable time I've spent in the park, I rarely saw more than a handful of folks use it at any given time, it was in fact not unusual to see as many lifeguards on duty as visitors. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing. I've stated before that a park's success should not be measured entirely upon the number of people who use it. In fact, sometimes the exact opposite should be a factor, as one of the joys of a city park is being able to escape the maddening crowds. However given the tremendous expense and amount of land devoted to the this one amenity which is open for only 90 days out of the year, it may be hard to justify keeping the beach. On the 275 days every year when the beach is closed, the area taking up dozens of acres of precious parkland is partially fenced off, and resembles a construction zone. Combined with the mechanical equipment necessary to keep the beach running, for three quarters of a year, this considerable chunk of real estate in Humboldt Park is a no-man's land, and an eyesore,

Then there is the historical significance and the architectural integrity of Humboldt Park. Much work has been done in the past decade to restore Jens Jensen's Prairie River back to its original splendor. Unfortunately, the waters of the river have to be restricted by a levee in order to avoid mingling with the the beach water. Other smaller lagoons to the north and east which once were part of the greater lagoon, have been closed off as well. These transitions are ugly and disrupt the continuity of the system of lagoons and rivers that were so carefully planned by Jenny and later Jensen.

Lagoon split in half: on the levee that separates the waters of the restored prairie river, right, from the beach,

Of course most users of parks are not concerned about historical significance and architectural integrity, they are interested in the amenities that cater to their needs. This is entirely reasonable, as a public park is many things to many people. For that reason, our parks are the most democratic of all our public spaces. Jens Jensen, Frederick Law Olmsted, Alfred Caldwell, and all the great landscape architects responsible for our parks understood this.

My son and I visited our old stomping grounds this past Sunday. As he went off to play basketball, I ran into a friend who was exploring the nooks and crannies of the park with his daughter, as I did with my children and my parents did with me. As I continued my own exploration, I came in contact with people of different ages, ethnicities and tax brackets. They were engaged in all sorts of activities: fathers playing soccer with their kids, families picnicking, old men (and a heron) fishing, children on swings and monkey bars in the playground, couples (and several turtles) sunbathing, nature lovers enjoying nature, ballplayers playing ball, bikers biking, joggers jogging, and folks just strolling, taking in a lovely spring day in what is still one of the most beautiful places in Chicago. All the while, salsa music blasting from a large party at the east end of the park, no doubt a preview of the massive Puerto Rican Festival to be held in a few weeks, provided the soundtrack for a magnificent urban experience.

Tanks containing chlorine and no swimming sign in front of the no-man's
land that is the site of the Humboldt Park Beach when it is not in use,
which is most of the time.

The architects of our parks knew that in order to achieve the goal of providing as many functions a park could reasonably accommodate, a careful balance had to be reached where one function flows seamlessly into another, contributing but not interfering. On top of that, the great landscape architects like the ones mentioned above, designed their parks to appear effortless and natural, as if they were not designed at all.

Unfortunately, the Humboldt Park beach disrupts Jens Jensen's thoughtful balance in every respect; it could just as well have been dropped into the park from outer space. The inland beach is a very nice perk for the people in the neighborhood who take advantage of it. But given the fact that the beach serves only a handful of people for a brief part of the year at a great cost, in terms of the environment, aesthetics, economics, and space, I believe that its ultimate fate needs to be seriously questioned. At the risk of sounding like my mother, perhaps the thing should never have been built in the first place.

I have no doubt the Humboldt Park community who struggled to get the beach built in the seventies, will not let it go without a fight, which of course is their right. As I said, it's a very difficult proposition to take something away from a community, especially a lovely amenity like a neighborhood beach. Humboldt Park today may not be exactly what it was during my mother's childhood, but what is indisputable, is that today it is light years ahead of where it was forty years ago when the beach was built. Inside the park's boundaries are limitless year round opportunities for visitors to take advantage of, just as Jens Jensen intended. Much has been lost in the nearly one hundred fifty years of the park's existence, such as boats upon the lagoon, camping out under the stars, and Kościuszko. But other great things have come along to replace what has been lost, and I dare say that Humboldt Park today is as vital and vibrant as ever.

Sad as the possible loss of the neighborhood beach may be, reclaiming the enormous amount of space it takes up has the potential of making Humboldt Park all the better. Painful as it might be, in the end I believe rethinking the beach is the right choice for the park and vast majority of people who use it.

My park

Humboldt Park, 1995

I've been thinking about parks lately. Our book, The City in a Garden, A History of Chicago's Park's has recently been revised; you can buy it here. Fourteen years ago, Judith Bromley and I were sent by the book's author Julia Bachrach all over the city to photograph parks in various states of disrepair. Julia sent me back in 2010 to revisit some of the parks that had work done in the intervening years and other parks that did not exist a decade before, including of course Millennium Park. That park caused a furor among some people who believed that the money spent to create the extravagant downtown park would have been better spent on the neighborhood parks instead.

Well I have first hand experience that gives credence to my belief that those critics had no idea what they were talking about. Beyond the boon to the city that Millennium Park brought, obviously the critics have not visited the neighborhood parks in the past ten years, as a great deal of time, money, and effort have gone into their restoration and rehabilitation.

What attracted me to Chicago parks in the first place, photographically speaking that is, was their design. Some of the most renouned landscape architects this country had to offer designed parks in Chicago: Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen and Albert Caldwell to name only three. Over the years their parks have been neglected (to put it mildly), and much work has been done in the last decade to bring back a semblance of what these designers originally intended.

Needless to say, a lot of things have changed in the hundred plus years since most of Chicago's parks were conceived and built, including the very function of the urban park itself. Once the "lungs of the city", parks provided a refuge for urban dwellers from the inexorable grind of the industrial city. In a time of few options for city folk to get away from it all, urban parks were the essential civilizing institutions of the city. Today we have far more options for our free time, and in this day and age of play dates and organized sports, the folks who run the parks place their emphasis on structured recreation for their visitors over spontaneous activities such strolling or simply watching the world go by. The carefully nuanced landscapes laid out by the parks' architects often have to compete with ball fields, basketball and tennis courts and playgrounds.

Regardless, much to the city's credit, both aspects of Chicago's parks, the landscape and the recreational facilities have been vastly improved since the time The City In a Garden was first published in 2001. One of the prime examples of this urban renaissance is Humboldt Park.


I lived the first ten years of my life in an apartment building on Humboldt Boulevard on the northwest side of Chicago. Technically we were in the community of Logan Square, but everyone on our block considered themselves Humboldt Parkers, after the great park three blocks south of our home. To some Chicagoans today, the very mention of Humboldt Park inspires fear, evoking images of street gangs, poverty, drugs, and crime. To others the park with its rose garden, expansive lagoons, splendid Schmidt, Garden and Martin boathouse and refectory, and miniature prairie river fed by a natural spring, represents a magnificent work of design, the work of one of the great prophets of landscape architecture, Jens Jensen. Still to others, Humboldt Park is the heart of Boriqua, Chicago's Puerto Rican community.

To me, it's simply my Humboldt Park.

Some of my earliest childhood memories are of riding on my father's shoulders in Humboldt Park as he whistled the Colonel Bogey March while strolling past the hill that I would later sled on, and the lagoon where I would learn to ice skate and play hockey. During the summer we'd use two perfectly spaced trees as soccer goal posts where we'd take turns shooting at one another. Or we'd just go for long walks through the park, which was really the best thing of all. Where the Loop was the domain of my mother, Humboldt Park was where I spent time with my dad. As he worked long hours on weekdays and Saturdays in his paint shop, the limited time we had together on Sundays in that park was special.

Drawn by the the American Dream of owning a house in the suburbs, my family moved out of our old neighborhood which had become shall we say, rough around the edges by 1968. That was the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed. We weren't touched directly by those riots that decimated the West Side of Chicago, but the parkway in front of our house served as a staging area for troops from the Illinois National Guard (who were issued the famous "shoot to kill" order from Mayor Daley the Elder), as they prepared to engage the rioters only two miles away. But none of that phased me. Responding to my protests about leaving our home, I'll never forget my father pointing to a discarded broken bottle on the sidewalk saying: "don't you want to get away from all this?" I can't recall my response but it was probably no.

We moved out of the city and into the suburbs in August of that year, exactly during the time of the infamous Democratic National Convention and the riots that took place downtown. The whole world may have been watching but not us, we were too busy moving. On the surface things seemed pretty idyllic. Our house had a big basement where I could permanently set up my trains, and we had our own back yard with its own trees, perfectly spaced for goal posts. On the other hand, in the suburbs I experienced for the first time in my life bullying, political intolerance and bigotry. Shortly after we moved, in the middle of the night I heard gunshots, also something new to me. To add insult to injury, my beautiful five speed Schwinn Stingray bike which I rode without incident in Humboldt Park, was stolen from our garage.

Our new house in the suburbs did have a park only three doors away. But it wasn't Humboldt Park, not by a longshot. My spirits were lifted briefly when one Sunday my father took me to Columbus Park, not too far away. I felt right at home there, little did I know at the time there was good reason for the similarity, that park was also the work of Jens Jensen. But we had little reason to schlep ourselves down to Columbus Park when we had a perfectly serviceable park practically next door. After that, Sundays were never quite the same.

That first year in our new home was probably the toughest year of my life; I didn't fit in at my new school and I missed my old friends and my old home. Suffice it to say, that experience only intensified my love of Humboldt Park. I went there every chance I could, going so far as moving back into the old neighborhood many years later.

This little trip down memory lane is a story the likes of which is told in big cities all over this country. Most people tend not to stay put, they move on, and the memories forged during the formative years of childhood are the ones we grasp and hold onto our entire lives. Perhaps because Humboldt Park was taken away from me (so to speak) at an early age, I never let go. Even though I spent far more of my formative years in the suburb, Oak Park to be exact, forging lasting friendships and determining the future course of my life there, I still tend to answer the question: "where did you grow up" with "Humboldt Park".

We no longer live within walking distance of Humboldt Park as we moved up to Rogers Park on the far north side of the city ten years ago. But our son spent his first two years worth of Sundays in Humboldt Park, on top of his old man's shoulders as I whistled the Colonel Bogie March while strolling past the hill where children still sled in the winter, and the lagoon where no one in these days of liability concerns is permitted to skate upon. Today we have three parks within walking distance of our home and take advantage of them every chance we get. My children learned to skate, sled, and do lots of other great things in those parks, they even learned the pleasures of just walking around taking in the scenery. Since we don't plan on leaving our current digs anytime soon, our children may not develop the same wistful relationship with their parks as I did with mine.

But I certainly hope they do. Those memories of Sundays in the park with my father, and later with my children, are some of the sweetest of my life. Despite its shortcomings and all the heartaches and tragedies that have taken place within its borders and the surrounding neighborhoods, it will always be a part of me, my beautiful Humboldt Park.

Humboldt Park with Jens Jensen's Prairie River, 1997. In the first decade of the 21st Centrury the park underwent a major restoration and the Prairie River, the centerpiece of Jensen's design, was returned to its original splendor.