The Chicago Park District is planning to hire big-cheese New York landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh (designer of the Brooklyn Bridge Park, above) to work on a redesign of the northeastern part of Grant Park.
According to the Park District's press release, the job includes "the Chicago Children's Museum project." What a shame. I sure hoped the idea of half-burying another museum in the park had gone up in smoke with the recession, but at least for planning purposes it's still alight, apparently. (Here's a reprint of a Reader story on the controversy.)
The idea now is to seize the chance to rework that part of the park since they have to reconstruct the crumbling concrete parking garage beneath it, which will require them to demo the crumbling concrete Daley Plaza fieldhouse. Isn't that enough concrete? Couldn't we find another place for a museum building (I hear there's a vacant spot where Michael Reese Hospital used to be) and use park space for something a little greener that doesn't charge admission? I love the Art Institute as much as anybody, but that's enough buildings in the park already.
There's no denying that this part of the park needs a rethink. In the view from the roof of that crumbling concrete fieldhouse you can catch a dim echo of the formal, Versailles-like original plan of the park. But the area's not used much, except by people seeking respite from various music festivals in the Petrillo Bandshell and wandering tourists, dumped out by the shiny steel BP Bridge, trying to find their way from Millennium Park to Lake Michigan.
So, No. 1 requirement, Mr. Van Valkenburgh: Connect the park to the lake the way they both deserve. The lake is this city's greatest glory; let's act like it. Don't make those poor tourists fight traffic on Lake Shore Drive until they are beached on the crumbling concrete path that borders Monroe Harbor. Frame the lake for us, embrace it, gather us into that glorious blue. And give us a good way to get to it. Overpass? Underpass? Something. If we're not going to get it done down near Buckingham Fountain, let's at least get it done across from Millennium Park.
Van Valkenburgh's firm has a worldwide reputation and has designed a number of urban parks. Their fee for this planning: $4.2 million, the Sun-Times says. Yes, $4.2 million is a chunk of change, at a time when the park district is laying people off and raising fees to cover its deficit. But this is the city that makes big plans, right? Expensive ones, anyhow.
The big thing I hope that Van Valkenburgh & Co. remember is that this park is supposed to be "forever open, clear and free," like Montgomery Ward said. This is not Millennium Park, constructed on railroad air rights with money from private donors. This is public parkland covered under those 19th Century court decisions. I take "open" and "clear" to mean "without buildings," and I take "free" to mean not just "people are free to use it" but "they don't have to pay to use it."
Down south of Buckingham Fountain, the Park District has recently done a very nice job of reworking the old rose garden as a plaza (above) bordered by boxwood, hydrangeas and roses framing a view of the fountain. It's a lovely spot, really, a quiet nook with benches secluded from the fountain crowds. Not coincidentally, this plaza, funded by Tiffany & Co., is so designed that it can easily be closed off to be rented out for weddings and other private parties.
There's nothing wrong with renting out park space for weddings; I do volunteer work at the Garfield Park Conservatory, where people get married all the time.
But I sure hope that, in addition to this misplaced admission-charging museum, Van Valkenburgh's brief does not include redesigning the northeastern corner of Grant Park as a bunch of revenue-producing "event spaces" convenient for private parties. There's enough of that in Millennium Park. Let's make this corner a people's park, OK?
Got a garden question? I recommend you call or e-mail the Plant Clinic of The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, the Master Gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension or the Plant Information Service of the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe .
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