The weight room at Union Park wasn’t much of a facility–just a dingy little room in the field house under the el stop at Lake and Ashland, but it meant a lot to the people who used it. On July 16 the Park District closed it. As one lifter put it, “something’s pretty out of whack” in a city that can afford to spend $475 million on Millennium Park but can’t afford a few hundred dollars to buy some weights for the people who use a small park on the near west side.
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By and large the crowd’s an eclectic mix of black men. Some are professionals like Hudson, a policy analyst for the state government. Some are cops and probation officers, and some are guys just out of prison and living in one of several nearby halfway houses. “It’s a good way to blow off steam and keep frustration down and stay off the street,” says C.J.
According to Hudson, C.J. keeps the peace. “He’s a man everyone respects,” he says. “I really never seen anything quite like the weight room. You have cops and ex-criminals–people lifting weights with folks they might have arrested. It’s very cool. No problems. It’s just a positive place for African-American men from divergent paths to come together. We talk about religion, politics, our jobs, our families–pretty much everything. Or we just lift. It’s a place where a professional might be able to help a young man out with a contact or resume.”
According to the Park District, the closing had nothing to do with race or gentrification. “The equipment in that park was hazardous,” says Michele Jones, a Park District spokeswoman. “We didn’t remove it because we were trying to get rid of the weight room. The equipment was not suitable–it was dangerous. From what I understand, it was not only very old, it wasn’t working properly. It wasn’t well put together. We used it for as long as we could, and for public-safety reasons we had to take it out. Believe me, it was not something we just picked up and did because we had some other use for the room.” She didn’t say anything about the equipment being unsanitary.
The weight lifters don’t begrudge Daley and his friends their caviar and lobster, but they say it’s hard to hear the city cry poor in the face of such excess. “It’s all about choices,” says Morgan. “They just don’t want to spend a sliver of what they got on the weight room.”
