A couple weeks ago Mayor Daley took his Olympics dog-and-pony show to the Walt Disney Magnet School on the north side, far from the south-side neighborhood parks that will be overtaken if his plans for the 2016 games go through.
Over at Jackson Park, the proposed site of a 20,000-seat field hockey arena, opinion’s a bit more split, as some opponents try to figure out how to deal with an all-powerful mayor with a short temper and a long memory.
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Stretching along the south lakefront, with Stony Island to the west, the Museum of Science and Industry to the north, and 67th Street to the south, Jackson Park, site of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, is one of the city’s most storied natural splendors. Designed by the 19th-century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, it contains more than 600 acres of open land, including an oak savanna, a Japanese garden, and a wooded island in the middle of one of its two lagoons. To cross the bridge and walk through the island is to leave the city—you can’t even hear the traffic from Lake Shore Drive.
In the case of Jackson Park, residents aren’t sure it’s a gift they really want. How can the city bring in so many spectators without paving over parkland for parking? How can they build and tear down a 20,000-seat arena without closing down the park for at least a couple of years? And what about fencing off and tearing up valuable parkland—scaring birds, trampling grass, disrupting tranquillity, and evicting soccer and football players—just to host a three-week party? What does Jackson Park get out of the deal?
On the other hand, the community could use a couple of nice new playing fields—even if they are a decade off. “I spend a week in the new season filling in holes on that field. This will leave us with a field that is not so dangerous to our children,” says Louise McCurry, another member of the Jackson Park Advisory Council. “I feel it’s going to be a very good thing. It would be a nice thing for children to play on a field where the Olympics were held.”
For more on politics, see our blog Clout City at chicagoreader.com.
