All Gone

Now something from the day late and dollar short file:

Back in 2017, I wrote about the plans to build the Barack Obama Presidential Library smack dab in one of Chicago's most important treasures, Jackson Park. On a lovely summer day, I took my daughter to the proposed site and my heart broke as we encountered a lovely urban landscape filled with rolling berms and an extensive variety of mature trees, some well over a century old, all marked with little orange dots, signifying they were slated for destruction. 

I didn't realize it at the time, as there were no little orange dots present, but just to the north of the landscape, one of the loveliest formal settings in the park, the Perennial Garden, which featured a circular sunken lawn surrounded by flowering crab apple trees and the eponymous perennial plants, was also to be destroyed. 

The landscape, creation of the estimable landscape architects Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, who restored the site back to a park after the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, and the Garden, the work of May E. McAdams in the 1930s, were not destroyed right away, as a lawsuit challenging the wanton destruction of public park land delayed the inevitable for a couple of years. 

In 2019 a judge threw out the suit and the Obamas, shovels in hand, ceremoniously broke ground in 2021, officially sealing the fate of this portion of Chicago history. 

According to this Op-Ed piece in the Chicago Sun Times, published in 2020, citing an inventory of the site, said the 640 trees on that site alone:

store 203.8 tons of carbon, remove 5.8 tons of carbon from the air per year, remove 341.5 pounds of air pollution per year,...and have an avoided rainwater runoff amount of 9,591 cubic feet per year...

In addition, according to the piece: 

The planned tree destruction and Obama Presidential Center construction will evict small wildlife, including resident birds. Its 23-story tower will occupy a currently building-free migratory bird flight path, which inevitably will become a new source of migratory bird deaths.

A magnificent White Oak that almost certainly was present during the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, dominates the landscape that stood in the way of the site of the future Barack Obama Presidential Library.
Everything in this photo has been destroyed. 

In my 2017 piece I quoted Barack Obama defending the construction of his monument in Jackson Park:

It's not just a building. It's not just a park. Hopefully it's a hub where all of us can see a brighter future for the South Side,

I have no qualms with the Obamas' claims for the value of the presidential library and all the potential good it will do for the city and especially for the South Side which has been neglected far too long. But I take strong issue with the former president's careless "not just a building, not just a park" remark. 

For God's sake Mr. President, you as a former Chicagoan of all people should know that landmarked buildings and parks are an important part of this city's cultural legacy. They were designed and built by some of the most significant artists this country has had to offer, and we have every right to be proud defenders of them. The loss of any of these should never be taken lightly as they are irreplaceable elements of our public, civic, and cultural landscape. 

Sometimes there may be no alternatives and serious choices must be made, even for ones on the National Register of Historic Places as Jackson Park is. 

But it is ridiculous to assume that there were no reasonable alternatives to the wholesale destruction of twenty contiguous acres of a landmark public park. Perhaps the designers could have worked with the existing landscape architecture of the park, or better yet, build somewhere else. It's a pretty hard sell to say there is simply no available land in that part of town. 

In both cases, perhaps scaling down the massive size of the project may have been necessary. I'm not sure but I don't think that idea would fly with the principal characters in this story, especially in a day and age where public monuments are becoming more and more imposing with each one trying to "one up" the previous one. Maybe we should be happy the Obamas didn't insist on having their monument occupy all of Jackson Park. 

Anyway, it's all water under the bridge now, the deed is done. A massive construction site today has replaced the landscape and perhaps the most beautiful formal garden that once graced the city.

It's all gone now and perhaps even worse than its loss is the dangerous precedent it sets. 

Our city's parks, a precious public trust, are no longer safe, even from people from whom we should expect much more.

What a shame. 

Little Orange Dots

I've written before of the plans to build the Barack Obama Presidential Library in Chicago. The project no doubt will be a tremendous boon to the city and to the community in which it resides. I'm happy the Obamas and the powers that be settled on the South Side of Chicago, because frankly, that's where the attraction belongs. I call it an attraction rather than a library because all of its holdings will be digitized, no papers will be stored on site. Perhaps Presidential Digital Repository would be a more appropriate term.

However as I've stated before, I'm less than enthused about the city's and the Obamas' cavalier attitude about building the proposed attraction on existing park land. It's clear where the former president's sympathies lie. Talking about the proposed Presidential Library/Digital Repository at the unveiling of the design, Obama said this:

It's not just a building. It's not just a park. Hopefully it's a hub where all of us can see a brighter future for the South Side,

Obviously to Barack Obama, to all the people working on the project, and to a great many Chicagoans, the benefits of having such an institution in the city, especially in a neighborhood that has seen better days, outweigh the loss of several acres of parkland. After all, it's just a park right?

Frankly I find this attitude, while understandable, grossly shortsighted. Our public parks are a public trust, they are meant for the use of the public, and should not be surrendered to private interests, even worthwhile ones. Unfortunately the city does this all the time when they rent out park space for commercial events such as the massive Lollapalooza Music Festival which will be taking place in Grant Park next weekend. This means that unless you're willing to drop hundreds of dollars on a ticket to the event, that enormous, important downtown public park will be off limits not only next weekend, but now for the setup, and for whatever amount of time it takes to clean up the mess.

What's more, many of our parks, including Jackson Park which is where the Obama Library will be built, are significant architectural landmarks designed by some of the greatest landscape architects this country had to offer. They are an important connection to our history as well as works of art in their own right, Compromising them is no different than significantly altering or tearing down our most beloved architectural landmarks. Sadly, we do that all the time.

Obviously this is a losing battle, and Chicago has taken the easy way out. This city has no intention of giving up millions of dollars of much needed revenue just so you and I can spend a summer afternoon strolling through Grant, or any other park that has some kind of paid festival going on, any more than it's going to give up the chance to be the home of the Obama Library. Still reeling from the potential lawsuit preventing the George Lucas Museum from being built on the lakefront, causing the Lucas family to give up their plans to build here, Mayor Rahm Emanuel doubled down on his efforts to not let that happen with the presidential library. Even the park's most visible advocacy group, the Friends of the Parks, has remained uncharacteristically silent on this one.

Two potential park sites were on the docket during the preliminary competition to bring the Obama Library to Chicago. The first runner up was on the western edge of Washington Park. I wrote about that site here two years ago. The site that was selected is on the western edge of Jackson Park, from 63rd up to 60th streets. One could consider Jackson and Washington to be one continuous park connected by the Midway Plaisance which surrounds 59th and 60th Streets in Hyde Park. The entire collection of parks and green space was the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux who are perhaps best known as the architects of Central and Prospect Parks in New York City. While altered substantially, both parks have retained much of the spirit of those two remarkable architects. Perhaps the greatest alteration occurred at the Jackson Park library site, where football and baseball fields used by Hyde Park High School were added decades after the park was built. Those facilities will need to be moved for the sake of the library somewhere, most likely elsewhere in Jackson Park.

What remains then of the site you may ask, once the ballfields are removed? Hundreds of trees, many of them mature maples, London planetrees, cottonwoods, lindens, honey locusts and many other varieties including red and white oaks which judging by their girth, were most likely around at the time of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Surrounding the ballfields, gentle berms create a varied topography breaking up the tedium of Chicago's flat landscape.

When my daughter and I visited the site the other day, orange spots were painted on the trunks of every single tree on the site, save for the immature trees planted on the parkways, indicating they were all slated for removal:

White oak (center) that was probably around at the time of the Worlds Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Trees of different varieties framing Hyde Park High School

London planetree with orange dot at its base, marking its doom, along with the rest of the trees pictured on this post.

Here is a link to Blair Kamin's Chicago Tribune article on the unveiling of the design of the presidential library, the work of New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, that would occupy the Jackson Park site. From the rendering you can see that the parkways are untouched, but everything else, including the gentle berms and the century plus old trees are to be leveled.

As they say, you have to break an egg to make an omelette. I get it, you can't save everything, especially in a city that intends to grow and prosper. But this design appears to me that, just like the football field that was plopped down in the middle of the park, it was rendered without any consideration to the surroundings in which it is to be built. Jackson Park is a very special place and each segment of it was carefully designed to lead into the next. The Obama Library design as it exists on paper, could be plopped down into any part of the city. Its rigid, formal plan contrasts drastically with the free-form English garden style plan of Jackson Park.

To my eyes it would appear from visiting the site, that the design of the library could and should be altered to fit into the landscape, and in the process, save at least some of the century old trees. I'm not entirely against removing trees, even ones that have been around for over 100 years, for an important project, but you have to have an awfully good reason to do it. That would be the very least they could do.

But I wouldn't count on it.