May 31, 2017

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SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY The South Side Weekly is an independent nonprofit newsprint magazine written for and about neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. We publish in-depth coverage of the arts and issues of public interest alongside oral histories, poetry, fiction, interviews, and artwork from local photographers and illustrators. The South Side Weekly is dedicated to supporting cultural and civic engagement on the South Side and to providing educational opportunities for developing journalists, writers, and artists.

Volume 4, Issue 32 Editor-in-Chief Hafsa Razi Managing Editors Julia Aizuss, Andrew Koski Director of Staff Support Baci Weiler Deputy Editor Olivia Stovicek Senior Editor Emeline Posner

Politics Editor Adia Robinson Music Editor Austin Brown Stage & Screen Editor Nicole Bond Visual Arts Editor Rod Sawyer Editors-at-Large Maha Ahmed, Christian Belanger, Jake Bittle, Mari Cohen, Jonathan Hogeback, Ellie Mejía Contributing Editors Maddie Anderson, Maria Babich, Mira Chauhan, Bridget Newsham, Adam Przybyl, Carrie Smith, Sam Stecklow, Margaret Tazioli, Yunhan Wen Video Editor Lucia Ahrensdorf Radio Producers Andrew Koski, Lewis Page Social Media Editors Emily Lipstein, Bridget Newsham, Sam Stecklow Visuals Editor Ellen Hao Deputy Visuals Editor Jasmin Liang Photography Editor Jason Schumer Layout Editor Baci Weiler Staff Writers: Sara Cohen, Christopher Good, Rachel Kim, Ashvini Kartik-Narayan, Michal Kranz, Anne Li, Michael Wasney Fact Checkers: Eleanore Catolico, Sam Joyce, Rachel Kim, Adam Przybyl, Hafsa Razi, Carrie Smith, Tiffany Wang, Baci Weiler Staff Photographers: Denise Naim, Jason Schumer, Luke Sironski-White Staff Illustrators: Zelda Galewsky, Natalie Gonzalez, Courtney Kendrick, Turtel Onli, Raziel Puma, Lizzie Smith Data Visualization: Jasmine Mithani Webmaster

Sofia Wyetzner

Publisher

Harry Backlund

The paper is produced by an all-volunteer editorial staff and seeks contributions from across the city. We distribute each Wednesday in the fall, winter, and spring. Over the summer we publish every other week.

Send submissions, story ideas, comments, or questions to editor@southsideweekly.com or mail to: South Side Weekly 6100 S. Blackstone Ave. Chicago, IL 60637 For advertising inquiries, contact: (773) 234-5388 or advertising@southsideweekly.com

Cover illustration by Dena Weiss

IN NATURE

A week’s worth of developing plants, odd animals, and signs of the weather, culled from the strolls, hikes, and wandering eyes of the editors

Ain’t That a Bench According to the Trust for Public Land—a nonprofit that provides funding for the creation of parks and protected lands, and also releases an annual ParkScore Index rating city parks on their features and accessibility—Chicago city parks are moving on up. The Windy City received four of a possible five “park benches” and a total score of seventy-one to claim the nation’s number eleven spot for best city parks. This is a four-spot jump from the previous fifteenth place ranking. The ParkScore data shows ninety-seven percent of Chicagoans live within a ten-minute walk of a park. However, Mayor Emauel, who boasts of the parks as one the city’s greatest assets for tourists remains oblivious to the possibility that the remaining three percent of Chicagoans who do not live within a ten-minute walk of a park may actually live in the park. But that information was not factored into the data.

Make Way for Turtles The turtles are on the move. This spring, there’s a good chance you’ll see one on or near a busy Chicago street as the reptiles begin to lay their eggs. Since a city street’s shoulder has the right soil type and frequent sunlight, turtles sometimes lay eggs near roadways, according to DNAinfo. Turtles usually lay between eight and fourteen eggs, with productivity dropping as their age increases. The eggs laid this month will either hatch in September or October, or they’ll incubate for a full year and hatch next May. There is no exact count of the number of turtles within city limits, but they can be found in any area with a waterway, including Jackson Park, Gompers Park, Humboldt Park, Lincoln Park, Garfield Park, Powderhorn Marsh and Prairie, Eggers Woods, and LaBagh Woods.

Turtles’ presence in these areas presents a danger to turtles and drivers alike. Organizations like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) are circulating tips for helping turtles safely cross the streets.

THE NATURE ISSUE a community of flowers

“Our primary goal is to make you smile.” thea michele smith.........................4 a complicated wild

“Wildness: Relations of People & Place” is a rare bird. christopher good............................5 sun, sand, and... something else

The beaches with the highest bacteria counts have historically been southern beaches. emma boczek.....................................6 building green spaces

“But we want to make sure it’s a resource for Chicagoans.” natalie friedberg.............................7 art in nature

An interesting, subtle addition to the park, one that blends in with its already beautiful surroundings and gives back to it. troy ordonez....................................8 the state of the lake

Rich Squirrel, Poor Squirrel Why would a squirrel choose one neighborhood to live in over another? According to Joel Brown, a biologist at UIC who studies squirrels in Chicago, the city’s two species of squirrel don’t tend to live in the same areas. Gray squirrels, as Brown told Marcus Kronforst, the host of WTTW’s Urban Nature web series, are most common in wealthier urban neighborhoods, while fox squirrels predominate in less affluent urban areas.

Squirrels obviously aren’t aware of socioeconomic factors when they decide to live in an area, so something else must be driving this pattern. After analyzing data collected by citizen scientists on a website he set up called Project Squirrel, Brown uncovered some interesting findings—fox squirrels are actually most common in the far suburbs, and his team concluded that the presence of predators—such as outdoor cats, dogs, or even coyotes—in an area was the variable that best explained where gray and fox squirrels live.

Fox squirrels spook less easy than gray squirrels, so they’ll live in areas where encounters with predators are more likely; however, in the absence of predators, gray squirrels will outcompete fox squirrels for resources.

“If you’re looking for the worst-case scenario, look no further than to Indiana’s coastline.” michal kranz..................................10

Backyard Birders Although the thirteen-acre Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary is “widely considered the best place in Illinois to view spring migration,” according to a recent WTTW article, students from Ruiz Elementary near Little Village recently proved that you can see tons of migrating birds in all kinds of other places in the city too. John Cawood, Openlands’ Education Program Coordinator, told DNAinfo, “It’s amazing to see what groups like Ruiz are seeing in our urban parks during their field trips. McKinley Park isn’t exactly known for being a birding hotspot.” As part of the Birds In My Neighborhood program, Chicago elementary schoolers learn about the birds in the neighborhoods around their schools in partnership with Openlands and Audubon Great Lakes. The Ruiz Elementary students spotted forty-five different birds—from the pied-billed grebe to the rose-breasted grosbeak—on an outing in McKinley Park.

“Showing up as a volunteer is fun and everything, but it’s more of an enriching, deeper experience when you’re responsible for the site.” maggie liu, lorraine lu, & sarah fineman...........................................16

how did south american monk parakeets end up in hyde park?

“No one has any idea why the birds in Hyde Park have left or died.” anne li & sage coffey.....................12 when will divvy be for everyone?

Divvy stations see virtually no usage in a large swath of the South Side. max bloom.......................................14 the eyes, ears, and voices of the parks

greener pastures

“One of the other things that was very important to [Olmsted] was access, by all of the people.” michael wasney...............................18 MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 3

FLOWERS

A Community of Flowers

THEA MICHELE SMITH

The Sunflower Project teaches “beauty, purpose, and art” one mammoth sunflower at a time

BY THEA MICHELE SMITH

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lose your eyes and imagine standing in the same spot 150 years ago, in the mid-nineteenth century. Chicago didn’t exist then as it does today; the city was a new invention, with its sidewalks, two-flats, and street lights that turn the sky a dusky orange. Chicago was born from its ashes, from the graveyard of the prairie. It’s easy to forget that we live with nature in the city; with every new skyscraper or pour of concrete, what’s left of the wild is further obscured. But through building our environment, we become an integral part of our ecological community. Chicago embodies the two biggest, and opposing, forces in the natural world—change and resiliency—as it grows while maintaining its essence.

In this year’s Nature Issue, the Weekly asks what it means to experience nature here in the city. We explore parks and the people who build, beautify, and maintain them. We track the growth of mammoth sunflowers and the decline of monk parakeets. We expose the troubling state of Lake Michigan and narrate environmental activists’ efforts to keep its waves clean for future generations. In the city, we take the nature around us for granted and don’t always realize what we have. In these pages, we’ll guide you through nature new and old: what was always here, what might disappear, and what’s yet to bloom in your backyard.

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sunflower begins as a seed. It is a compact, quickly forgotten speck resting in the palm of a hand. But let that seed drop into soil and provide it with water, and it will shed its coating and sprout a stem, leaves, and eventually, flower. For Kathy Fitzgerald and Rita Alvarez, this is how their organization, the Sunflower Project, began: from a small idea and a big passion.

The purpose of the Sunflower Project is beautiful in its simplicity: to plant one mammoth sunflower at every utility or light pole in the city of Chicago and beyond. To put it in other terms, Fitzgerald said, “Our primary goal is to make you smile.” A smile is in fact what inspired the idea to begin with.

Fitzgerald and Alvarez met twenty-seven years ago, marching together in Washington D.C. for the Americans with Disabilities Act; they have been together ever since. After planting mammoth sunflowers—a variety that can grow over ten feet tall, looking prehistoric in size—in front of their home in 2013, the women noticed just how many

smiles the flowers produced. At that time, they dreamed of spreading the radiance, friendliness, and youthfulness of sunflowers through both planting and education. Just two years ago, they decided to realize their dream. All it takes to start is poking a small hole in the ground, dropping one seed in, and covering it with dirt.

“We just decided, I can do that,” Fitzgerald said. “And you just have to do it.”

She gave me a knowing smile, telling me that people are oftentimes reluctant to begin something new, or starting community work from scratch. “But you have to find your own passion.”

In 2016, the first year of the project, they planted just in their immediate community on the Far Southeast Side. However, this year, Alvarez and Fitzgerald already expect to plant 132 flowers with the help of two schools. This educational aspect of their project involves teaching students from the South Side through classes, a Smart Museum tour, and planting. What exactly does the Sunflower

LIT

Project teach students? “Quite simply, beauty, purpose, and art,” Alvarez said.

Alvarez and Fitzgerald lead artistic classroom activities that teach students about gardening and plant science; they also take a tour of the Smart Museum. Then, they take their students into their communities to plant the flowers. The project’s seed is beginning to sprout as it builds connections with six different schools and with organizations like the Garfield Conservatory, Fitzgerald said.

Soon, it will blossom.

On May 11, Alvarez greeted me with her smile and led me into Hyde Park’s Smart Museum of Art for their annual fundraiser that raised money to pay for the costs of filing for 501(c)3 status, which would allow the Sunflower Project to officially become a tax-exempt nonprofit. She quickly introduced me to Fitzgerald and the members of the board, including President Dawn PilotaKlien, Vice President Josephine McEntee, Treasurer Celia Campos, and Secretary Jason Pallas. Each had their own story to tell, their own vision to share, yet all converged on a similar passion and love for helping their communities.

Alvarez and Fitzgerald are both docents at the Smart Museum, and Fitzgerald and McEntee are both graduates of the Odyssey Project, a program that offers a free, yearlong education in the humanities to residents of the South Side. Through the Smart Museum, they met Pallas, who organized classroom sessions to teach youth from the South Side about the environment and community service as part of the project. They soon met Erika Dudley, the senior program manager of the Odyssey Project, and the glue of the entire Sunflower Project. Dudley brought everyone together, inviting Alvarez and Fitzgerald into the community of the University of Chicago and the Smart Museum, which in turn gave them resources to kick-start their project.

The women I met also called notice to their age—many of them are in their sixties.

Fitzgerald talked about how people reach a certain point in their lives and think that they don’t have anything left to offer. “It’s about just trying to be the best that we can be,” McEntee said, “And that doesn’t have to stop at a certain age.” The women proved that you don’t need anything but passion and commitment to do something good for the community. “[It’s] the benefits of the little things, growing little by little—this is what sets [the Sunflower Project] apart,” Dudley said.¬

A Complicated Wild A collection of essays that highlight humans’ inextricable link to nature

BY CHRISTOPHER GOOD

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ildness: Relations of People & Place is a rare bird. It’s a collection bound not by genre or intended audience, but by a singular theme: that “human and wild communities are entangled, and can work toward collective health and selfrenewal.” And so, across four parts and twodozen essays, editors Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer recast mankind as a part of nature, one of many species, hitched to everything else in the universe.

This is heady stuff, the sort of crit-lit quicksand a lesser work might lose itself in.

Luckily, Wildness treads lightly and moves often. The settings range from the Pacific Northwest to Iceland and Kenya; some essays are starched-collar academic while others feel as if they should be read in Birkenstocks.

The pairing of grab-bag curation with a tight thematic focus emerges as one of Wildness’s real strengths: if you find yourself dozing off in a passage about soil aeration, you can rest easy knowing that long-form poems about sheep herding and a tender memoir about catfish gods are each a few pages off.

But as disperse and diverse as Wildness is, it clearly wants to ask big questions. In one essay, American Indian studies professor Enrique Salmón argues that “the environment has metaphorically assumed entity-like status in our language, and therefore, our mind.”

In another, Margo Farnsworth, a fellow at something called the Biomimicry Institute, writes of a chasm “between what we have known and understood and what remains mysterious and sometimes dangerous” about nature.

For Farnsworth, it is this “perceived split” that drives man to “subdue and conquer the

wild, making it more understandable and less wild in the process.” Thus, “the idea that there is some essential border between people and the rest of nature”—as lepidopterist Robert Michael Pyle writes elsewhere—“is one of the most dangerous dualisms in the world.”

Wildness makes repeated references to the twentieth-century ecologist Aldo Leopold, but it feels even more indebted to University of Chicago historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, who wrote in his influential 2009 essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” that “the distinction between human and natural histories [has] begun to collapse” under the weight of the anthropocene. In short, Chakrabarty argues that man did not exit from a state of nature via industrialization, but that he reemerged as a part of the environment once he had the capacity to affect it on an industrial scale. It’s a surprise that Chakrabarty goes unmentioned in Wildness, but where “Climate of History” is fundamentally anxious, Wildness has a sense of hope—and one rooted in Chicago’s South Side at that.

It also might come as a surprise that some of Wildness’s standout essays take place in an urban setting. And yet, “Cultivating the Wild on Chicago’s South Side,” a stunning interview between Michael Bryson and Michael Howard of Fuller Park’s Eden Place Nature Center, is one of the most affecting moments in the book.

In the two decades since Howard and his wife Amelia founded Eden Place on 44th and Stewart, the tarmac blacktops and roadside litter have been restored to a block of greenbelt.

Now it’s an interspecies community space, frequented by red-tailed hawks and whitetailed deer as much as local kids. According

to Bryson, “distinctions between wild and agricultural, or between native and nonnative species” aren’t at stake. What really matters is “the provision of many potential points of contact among humans, plants, and animals” to those who might not otherwise get the chance: “one can immediately recognize that human restoration is [Eden Place’s] real and perhaps most valuable purpose.”

The idea of mutual healing recurs in “Healing the Urban Wild,” an essay on Greencorps Chicago and the Eggers Grove forest preserve on the Far Southeast Side (a “glimpse of Chicago before there was a Chicago”). For Van Horn, the effects of Greencorps’ work (replanting trees, weeding invasive species) are reciprocal: both the volunteers and the landscape are rehabilitated by the work. Foresting becomes “a construction of relationships between people and land, an opportunity for the emergence of wildness.”

No matter how mystic it can sound at times, what Wildness is, ultimately, is a demystification. Its essayists seek to reconcile our lives with nature, to expose the two as interlaced—and to let that relationship enhance the wonder of wildness. David J. Rothman’s close reading of Robinson Jeffers’s poem “The Answer” sums up this perspective nicely: we must not distinguish between “the wholeness of life” and man, but “between that wholeness and man separated from that wholeness.” Like the best moments in Wildness, this one is at once starry-eyed and clear-sighted. Wildness: Relations of People & Place.

Edited by Gavin Van Horn and John Hausdoerffer. University of Chicago Press, 2017. 82 pages. $30.

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LAKE MICHIGAN

Sun, Sand, and... Something Else E. coli contamination concentrates at some South Side beaches

BY EMMA BOCZEK

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ere’s another reason to use a pooper scooper—when fecal matter from dogs, birds, and other animals flows toward Lake Michigan, waters at the shore can become contaminated with E. coli bacteria, putting a damper on even the sunniest beach day. Seven of the ten most contaminated Chicago beaches are on the South Side, eleven years of recently released data from the Chicago Park District show.

According to analysis by OpenCity software engineer Scott Beslow, some beaches in particular—63rd Street Beach, Rainbow Beach at 79th Street, and Calumet Beach— stand out, with over twenty percent of the samples taken at each beach exceeding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) contamination standard for safe swimming water.

Until last year, the city tracked beach water quality with E. coli bacteria, which flourishes in the gastrointestinal tracts of all warm-blooded animals. Although it exists mostly in harmless strains, some strains of E. coli do cause illness in humans, so the EPA considers it an indicator of potentially harmful water contaminants.

When a beach’s bacteria level tops the EPA-designated “exceedance” level—235 colony-forming units per 100 milliliters of water—the Chicago Park District issues a swim advisory for that beach. At this level, eight out of every thousand swimmers could potentially get sick, assuming the E. coli in the water is all from human fecal matter. But Chicago’s beach bacteria comes largely from nonhuman sources, and with animal E. coli, the risk of illness is “unclear,” according to United States Geological Survey scientist Meredith Nevers said.

“I just don’t think the numbers are out there,” she said. “So we play it safe by [tracking] E. coli regardless of source.”

Actual rates of contamination-related illness are difficult to track, as they are rare and not easily identified.

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The culturing test the Park District used until last year required eighteen to twentyfour hours to get results. This meant that beach managers issued (or did not issue) swim advisories based on results from the previous day. Studies have shown, however, that bacteria levels can vary substantially over small distances and times, and that there is little correlation between bacteria measurements from one day to the next. At one beach, a group of scientists wrote in a 2004 policy analysis, “there is virtually no relationship between the E. coli level on days when samples were taken that exceeded the standard and the E. coli level on subsequent days when the results were reported and swim closures were instituted.”

Chicago’s beach bacteria doesn’t come from any single source, according to Nevers—it comes from various “nonpoint” sources, including birds, dogs, and the stormwater runoff that flows over city streets and sidewalks carrying contamination straight into the lake. “A lot of pollution that goes into the lake—be it bacteria or phosphorus—is actually just running off the land,” she said. “And in urban areas there tends to be more of that. Because it’s so built up, there isn’t as much green space to absorb any rainwater.”

Algae and sand can provide warm, moist shelters in which bacteria can grow, Nevers said, adding to a beach’s bacteria population.

And once bacteria ends up at a beach, coastal structure, wind, currents, and temperature can all play a role in determining coastal bacterial presence.

This combination of factors makes addressing the bacteria count at any particular beach a slippery task.

“Not each beach is exactly the same. So to say ‘South Side versus North Side’ is a very inaccurate statement,” said Zvezdana Kubat, a Chicago Park District representative.

“Every beach is looked at on a case-by-case basis,” she added.

Nevertheless, the beaches with the highest bacteria counts have historically been South Side beaches.

“The biggest factor has to be the actual physical configuration of several of these beaches,” said Nevers. 63rd Street and Calumet Beaches, among others, have large breakwaters on their southern ends, artificial structures that trap sand and maintain the beach’s form. “Any bacteria that get into that area have a hard time getting back out.

The water never really refreshes, because you don’t get that full-lake circulation pulling the contamination away from the shoreline.”

The breakwaters are “sort of a doubleedged sword,” Nevers said. “You need to capture the sand, but in doing so you capture any nearshore contaminants as well. So it really is just the shape of the Lake Michigan shoreline.” She said that some North Side beaches that may have to close less often are “street-end” beaches with straight shorelines.

Rainbow Beach doesn’t have a large breakwater, though, and Nevers is unsure why it would have consistently high bacteria levels. “I think there’s some runoff issues,” she said. In 2013, the Park District partnered with the Illinois Institute of Technology to install a stormwater filter at Rainbow Beach. Since then, levels at Rainbow Beach have fluctuated, dropping in 2013 but rising again a few years later. The filter remains in place as the only project currently targeting high-exceedance South Side beaches.

Various other projects, many initiated through the congressionally funded Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, have helped the Park District come at the problem from different directions. One project brought on border collies to chase away gulls from beaches; another involved installing native plants to deter bird activity. A district-wide program called “flight control,” overseen by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, works to control the geese population through spraying grass and oiling nests around city

parks.

The Park District also reminds the public not to leave trash on beaches.

“When folks are littering that’s a contributing factor, because it attracts the gulls,” Kubat said. “That’s why we’re asking folks to do their part and not litter. Just as simple as throwing their trash away in a garbage bin is extremely helpful.”

This summer, the district is also launching a new bacteria-monitoring system, in partnership with the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“We consider it real-time testing,” said Carol Kim, who manages beach water quality for the Park District. “We get it in three to four hours.”

Rapid testing was piloted for the past two years at a few beaches, but will be expanded this year to eighteen to twenty beaches. Kubat explained that “some beaches are very close to one another so they only need to take one sample—they’re part of one continuous beach.” The new method uses DNA analysis techniques to measure levels of enterococci, a different bacteria approved by the EPA as an indicator of contamination from fecal matter.

With the new enterococci data, the city is planning on developing a predictive model that will forecast same-day bacteria levels using meteorological data. Although such models have generally been successful, they tend to be less effective on South Side beaches with breakwaters. “Poor circulation locations tend to be much more difficult to predict,” Nevers explained.

Nevers said that addressing the discrepancies caused by the shape of South Side beaches would be a tall order. “Adjusting circulation is a big bill,” she said. “You don’t want to take out a breakwater that’s protecting a harbor, or that’s protecting an area from flooding.” ¬

PARKS

Building Green Spaces

The Chicago Park District experiments with culturally informed collaborative park programming

NATALIE FRIEDBERG

BY NATALIE FRIEDBERG

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DATA VISUALIZATION BY JASMINE MITHANI

raveling north on the Lakeshore Trail, you may have noticed that at around 33rd Street the manicured lawn of the surrounding grass shifts to prairie grasses and shrubs. This marks one of the borders of the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, one of the Chicago Park District’s designated natural areas.

The Park District began the process of rehabilitating the wildlife corridor in 2000, building trails and weeding out invasive species, replacing them with native plant species from prairies, savannahs, woodlands, and marshes. The Wildlife Corridor stretches from 47th to 39th Streets on the west side of Lake Shore Drive and from just north of 39th Street to the McCormick Bird Sanctuary at 24th Street on the east side, right up against the water. This habitat enhancement is ongoing and will continue indefinitely, depending on funding and seasonal changes.

“We sort of have to live as the plants grow,” Naureen Rana, a project manager for the Park District, said. “We see our role with the natural areas in perpetuity. We’re always going to be doing enhancement, we’re always going to be weeding invasives.”

The Park District has teamed up with the Field Museum and a host of nonprofits

from the surrounding communities to start the Roots and Routes Initiative. Roots and Routes aims to sustain wildlife and to improve access to nature for communities nearby.

“It begins with the acknowledgement that not everyone comes to nature in the same way,” said Jacob Campbell, an urban environmental anthropologist who leads the Field Museum’s social science team. “There are a lot of different cultural values and ways in which heritage and history shape the way that people experience the natural world or see nature as a part of their lives.”

The project began when the Park District reached out to the Field Museum for help with outreach in 2013. Since then, the Park District and the Field Museum have partnered with Sacred Keepers Sustainability Lab, Centers for New Horizons, South Side Community Arts Center, Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, Contratiempo, and the Chinese-American Museum, among others.

Campbell stressed the collaborative nature of the partnerships. “[We are] trying to create platforms for residents and organizations in these communities not only just to communicate but to be decision MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 7

BIRDS

makers at the table for how a natural area develops, how a green space is co-created and framed,” he said.

Since 2013, the Roots and Routes Initiative partnerships have resulted in a variety of programs for the Wildlife Corridor, including a recently completed art installation project called Gathering Spaces.

This project took input from community organizations and recruited local artists to create five different art spaces designed for people to gather along the trails.

A main pillar of the Roots and Routes Initiative is youth engagement. The Green Ambassadors program provides paid internships for about fifteen high school students every year from Chinatown, Bronzeville, Little Village, Pilsen and surrounding communities. The students receive intensive training in social and ecological research methods and then use those skills to tackle a park- or natural arearelated issue in their community. In one project last year, students compiled a list of recommendations to the developers of Paseo, a High Line–style project that would connect Pilsen and Little Village.

Lakefront Legend and Lore, another youth-oriented program in a partnership with Centers for New Horizons, trained students to conduct interviews and had them gather oral histories specifically related to the lakefront. The students uncovered an alternative history of the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, distinct from the narrative of ecological rehabilitation, replete with legends of bogeymen meant to keep children out of the Burnham Park Corridor, which had been a place for teenagers to loiter and mess around before it was redeveloped by the Park District.

According to Matthew Freer, assistant director of landscape and natural areas for the Park District, the Roots and Routes Initiative rethinks what it means to engage with natural space.

“We’re shifting to a model of participation in the natural area versus simply preservation of land,” he said .A lot of landholders in the natural world setting tend to err on the side of preservation in the fear of stomping on precious plants...but we want to make sure it’s a resource for Chicagoans.” .

The natural areas program has grown by hundreds of acres and the Park District hopes to expand it by hundreds more in the next few years. The Roots and Routes Initiative sets a precedent for a new way to engage with and develop that natural space—it caters to not just birds, butterflies, and native plants. 8 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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Art In Nature

s part of an artistic initiative to bring more aesthetic life into the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, a series of “Gathering Spaces” were recently introduced into the long stretch of park. These five spaces— “Sankofa for the Earth,” “Sounding Bronzeville,” “Caracol,” “La Ronda Paraketa,” and “Set in Stone”— offer refuge for those who find themselves tired along their

“Gathering Spaces” along the path of the Burnham Wildlife Corridor

BY TROY ORDONEZ

travels. An attractive getaway from the already serene landscape that envelops them, each Gathering Space has its own important backstory that connects to its creation, material, and neighborhood.

Spread out between the three neighborhoods of Bronzeville, Chinatown, and Pilsen, the five Gathering Spaces were created by organizations located in their respective communities.

Sankofa for the Earth Artists: Arlene Turner Crawford and Dorian Sylvain. Organized by South Side Community Art Center, Bronzeville. Located south of the 43rd St. walking bridge.

NATALIE FRIEDBERG

“Sankofa for the Earth” features a “Sankofa” bird made from recycled materials and uses a mixed-media creation of painting, mosaic, and wood in order to take its shape. In the Ghanaian language Twi, Sankofa means “go back and fetch it.” The Sankofa is a symbol resembling a bird looking backward over its tail, reflecting the belief that our pasts hold important information to move us forward in life. The installation itself is a majestic beauty that feels out of place, its bright colors and intricate design standing out from the natural greens and browns of the surrounding trees and dirt. One could spend an afternoon piecing together the intricate details that makes it such an interesting work on the seating made from repurposed wood around the installation.

Sounding Bronzeville Artists: Fo Wilson and Norman Teague. Organized by Bronzeville Community Development Partnership, Bronzeville. Located south of 35th St. and west of Lake Shore Dr. Several organic, amorphous sculptural forms spread out in a circular patch make up “Sounding Bronzeville.” These forms rise up from the ground at differing heights and shapes, all covered in the native plant material that surrounds them. Their function allows them to define the boundaries of the area they find themselves in and also allows for visitors to come and sit upon them to rest. While unassuming at first, the piece is an interesting, subtle addition to the park, one that blends in with its already beautiful surroundings and gives back to it.

NATALIE FRIEDBERG

PARKS Caracol Artists: Georgina Valverde and Diana Solis. Organized by Contratiempo, Pilsen. Located south of McCormick Place Bird Sanctuary, by the lakefront at 2400 S. Lake Shore Dr.

LUKE SIRONSKI-WHITE

La Ronda Parakata Artists: Hector Duarte and Alfonso “Piloto” Nieves. Organized by Casa Michoacán, Pilsen. Located south of the 31st St. Harbor, around 3300 S. Lake Shore Dr. A circular structure that brings to mind druidic rituals, this installation is inspired by the magic symbolism of the butterfly, harmony with nature, and migration. The fence around many tree stumps arranged in a circle takes on a looping butterfly form that feels as magical as the insect that inspired the project. The hill it is located on allows a wide view of the nearby harbor and gives an added sense of adventure to its discovery—once you’ve climbed the hill, you may gaze upon its odd wonder. This fabrication stands in the face of nature, but is its near equal in charm.

LUKE SIRONSKI-WHITE

Set in Stone Artists: Andy Bellomo and Anna Murphy. Organized by Chinese-American Museum of Chicago, Chinatown. Located south of Oakwood and west of Lake Shore Dr., around 4000 S. Lake Shore Dr. This installation’s main goal was to recreate the look of a traditional Chinese “scholar’s rock,” which is shaped and eroded by nature into unusual forms. To do this, Andy Bellomo and Anna Murphy needed to sculpt, mold, and fabricate the sculpture in such a way that visitors could regard the rock with that certain grace or magnificence that is associated with the traditional idea of a “scholar’s rock.” Its place in the center of a

Based on the interior design of a conch shell—or “caracol,” in Spanish—this large spiral represents the desire to belong while maintaining the core of one’s own identity and memories, according to the project’s organizers. The large, open-ended spiral structure can function as a place of work, if need be. Even better, it would suit a relaxing picnic, as its ending point turns into a spiraling table with multiple seats for weary travelers. The artists intended the space for recreation and even for performances; just on its outer edge is a small platform for anyone trying to show off to those around them. You can sit near or upon this artwork and gaze out at the seemingly endless lake, or turn back to marvel at the city’s skyline.

tranquil rock garden certainly helps, along with the log bench and stump for sitting.

Though it does not offer the same type of sitting space as the other installations, which have seating incorporated into their design, the rock offers a chance for greater examination and self-reflection. Here, a visitor can take time to gaze at the artwork from afar, as one might in an art gallery or other art space.

T

he path to these works is fairly long—finding them could be considered a small quest in itself. What makes matters more interesting is that the path itself is not grandiose; one could mistake it for a naturally made path constructed by frequent forest travelers. The path’s unassuming quality leads the spectator to consider where they might be headed, and if there’s anything down that road. Thankfully, occasional roadway markers help guide the way, as each individual Gathering Space also comes with a logo that can be found along the main paths of Burnham Park. Meanwhile, if you find yourself unable to traverse the narrow Burnham Wildlife Corridor path, on the main path through the center of Burnham Park lie several sculptures that call less attention to themselves. Think of them as Easter eggs in an already marvelous adventure.

On the journey to locate these artworks, you might find yourself questioning their purpose: is it greater than simply the gathering spaces that they claim to be? One can appreciate the beauty of their independent creation, reflect upon the neighborhoods that they are made to represent, or simply bask in the charm they exude through their sheer existence. Parks, known for the natural beauty they represent to their city, aren’t always associated with the art placed within them, and those works seldom add more to their location than the aesthetic value. Yet these spaces have both form and function—they act as public art truly made for the public, not just for the sake of beauty but for use, interaction, and the enjoyment of visitors to the park.

MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 9

The State of the Lake

A bleak future for Chicagoland’s lakeshore under Trump’s environmental regime

BY MICHAL KRANZ

O

n Tuesday, April 11, a chemical spill was discovered at the U.S. Steel plant in Portage, Indiana, twenty miles down the coast of Lake Michigan from Chicago. A pipe failure caused the chemical to spill into the Burns Waterway, which feeds into Lake Michigan, at a distance of one hundred yards from the shore. Several beaches along the Indiana shore were closed, and officials warned South Side residents to avoid the lakeshore before tests could occur. While testing by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Chicago Department of Water Management later revealed that chemical levels in Lake Michigan’s waters were well below federal safety standards, the spill elicited a strong reaction from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who criticized U.S. Steel for its “careless conduct.”

The chemical in question was hexavalent chromium, a carcinogenic compound present in a variety of industrial products. It is the same substance that, as the subject of the 2000 biographical film Erin Brockovich, drew public attention to the power of consumer advocacy in the face of corporate interests.

Twenty-one years after the titular activist in the film settled her famous lawsuit against Pacific Gas & Energy, hexavalent chromium has once again captured public attention: this time, as an illustrative example of the threats posed to the Great Lakes Basin by pollution, deregulation, and budget cuts in the age of Donald Trump.

Y

et the proposed Trump budget is only the latest in a series of threats to the ecology of southern Lake Michigan—for years activists have been looking for creative solutions to contain the damage industrial development has caused, and continues to cause, to the ecosystem.

Rachel Havrelock, a professor of English and Jewish Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has become an advocate for ethical water management in the Great Lakes region. A think tank she founded in 2014, the Freshwater Lab, has hosted working groups 10 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

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and conferences in Chicago on how to govern the Great Lakes and Lake Michigan in particular, featuring input from activists, local mayors, and experts in the field.

“We really see the relationship between the communities and the water as central to the transformation of post-industrial sites,” Havrelock says. “There is a tremendous amount of potential and good that proximity to clean water can provide for the basin.”

However, the Trump administration has proposed deep cuts to both the federal EPA and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative for the 2018 budget, aiming to reduce funding for the EPA by thirty-one percent of its current budget and to terminate the latter program entirely. “Basically the funding cuts, as they’re threatened to occur, would be slashing the regulatory oversight of the EPA,” said Havrelock. Cuts to the restoration initiative would decimate the clean water rule in the area, she added. Chicago PBS affiliate WTTW has reported that one of the primary ways this would manifest locally would be in reduced cleanup efforts in waterways leading into Lake Michigan—including the Chicago and Calumet Rivers, central waterways in the city’s South and Southwest Sides.

Because of the size and spread of the Great Lakes across several states, the federal EPA has played a central role in coordinating efforts between local EPA branches and other environmental oversight organizations.

Bruce Rowe, National Park Service (NPS) public information officer at the Indiana Dunes, says the hexavalent chromium spill is a good example of how the NPS relies on the federal EPA for support.

“Their [the federal EPA’s] work was invaluable in ensuring that the National Park Service was getting the information we needed to protect our visitors and park resources. Based on this, we decided to close three of our beaches until we determined how far the spill had spread,” Rowe said. “I can also say that we at Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore view the EPA as a critical partner in our work to protect both the health of

our visitors and of our park’s resources.” Kim Biggs, the Illinois EPA’s public information officer, cited a similar reliance on the federal agency for containing and evaluating the spill’s impact.

Biggs stressed that although the spill occurred in Indiana, the local EPA was ready to confront potential threats to Illinois’s waterways. “Illinois EPA’s primary focus has been on the protection of the water systems served by Lake Michigan.” But she also said that although the Illinois EPA coordinates with agencies of all sizes, from the Illinois Management Emergency Agency to the City of Chicago, it is reliant on the federal EPA’s central authority.

While Biggs and Rowe declined to speculate on the effects of the Trump administration’s cuts, Havrelock says that the reduced budget would have broad repercussions for the entire basin. “If you’re looking for the worst-case scenario, look no further than to Indiana’s coastline.”

T

he U.S. Steel spill is nothing out of the ordinary along Indiana’s lakeshore if you ask Thomas Frank, an environmental activist living in East Chicago, Indiana, just a few miles across the state border. “This is business as usual,” he said of the spill. “The main thing that we’ve faced here has been permitted—they’ve been allowed to do this to the environment. That has caused enormous damage.”

Frank, who co-founded local organization the Community Strategy Group in East Chicago and sits on the board of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, a climate activism organization in Southeast Chicagoland, has seen the effects of Indiana’s environmental policies firsthand.

“I was the director of the Indiana Shipping Canal, which at the time and for most of the twentieth century was considered the most polluted body of water in the country,” Frank recounted. “I got a really blunt lesson on environmental contamination, the legacy of the last hundred years of industrialization

here, and the effects that were kind of left here in the community.”

Frank explained that the industrial corridor that stretches from the Indiana lakeshore into the South Side of Chicago is one of the oldest and largest in the country. However, while Chicago began to deindustrialize and transition to an information economy decades ago, the Indiana side of Chicagoland took a different path.

“On the Indiana side, we are reindustrializing,” said Frank, “and what we’ve seen is a loosening of the environmental regimes here in Indiana, providing favorable conditions for industry to operate here.”

Havrelock worries that the slashed EPA and restoration initiative funding—which provided $125 million in restoration funding to Indiana and $226 million to Illinois between 2010 and 2016—would reproduce the hands-off policies in Indiana across the entire Lake Michigan region.

“I would predict that if the federal government had its way, we’d see greater pollution and less regulation in the poorest areas of the Great Lakes,” she said.

“Corporations would be allowed to dump more, there’d be less testing, less regulation, less money for scientific research, and when disasters happen, we would be missing the money to help those in need.”

Without effective federal standards and regulations in place, areas like the South Side of Chicago that have similar industrial legacies as Northwest Indiana and few political resources would be hit especially hard by the Trump administration’s cuts.

“We do know that pulling the funding out of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative would hugely impact this region because one of the issues it has addressed is the legacy of industrialization,” Frank said. He explained that environmental degradation in this region has its roots in the long history of manufacturing in Chicagoland, and that many of the water and land use issues here are direct results of this legacy.

LAKE MICHIGAN

ROHAN PATRICK MCDONALD

Frank said lead contamination serves as a particularly salient example of how industrial history continues to affect the area, and how giants like BP get away with shirking environmental regulations. He recalled the case of the West Calumet housing project in East Chicago, which was built on top of a lead refinery. Referencing federal standards for levels of lead in water, “400 parts per million triggers a clean up, 1,200 parts per million of lead in the soil triggers an emergency action,” Frank said. “But what they [environmental inspectors] found in West Calumet in 2014 was [up to] 91,000 parts per million, and people had been living there for forty years.

BP bought the liabilities afterward.”

While residents were evacuated with the help of the EPA, the 2014 consent decree allowed DuPont and Atlantic Richfield, an American petroleum company acquired by BP in 2000, to pay $26 million—enough to finance the cleanup of two of the three affected zones, but not enough to cover health or moving expenses incurred by residents. (A group of residents would later file a classaction lawsuit against the two companies.)

In the same year that the consent decree was approved, BP was also found responsible for a crude oil spill directly into Lake Michigan.

Flare-ups like the hexavalent chromium

spill in April and the 2014 crude oil spill are merely extremes of an already broken system.

The very flow of the Grand Calumet River, which is a part of a network of channels along the Indiana-Illinois border, is largely composed of factory waste. “The flow of that river is due to industry discharges, and that’s about ten to eleven billion gallons annually of industrial waste and sewage that is discharged into that and goes out to Lake Michigan,” Frank said. There is little being done to address the everyday realities along the lakeshore, he continued. “In a community like this, there are huge impairments and very little commitment to really solve these problems. These kinds of things happen to the most vulnerable populations. When you allow polluters to pollute, it affects their whole socioeconomic and environmental livelihoods. It affects everything.”

T

he difficult situation that Frank describes is one that is overseen by an EPA that is already struggling to keep up, even before the cuts the Trump administration is promising. Without the coordinating capabilities of the federal EPA, a new paradigm may have to emerge to manage the waters of the Great Lakes.

“We would then have to look to our

states and the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, especially the division that handles the Illinois lakefronts,” said Havrelock, mapping out ways Illinois could avoid Indiana’s fate. “There are state agencies that everyone drinking [from] Lake Michigan would have to appeal to quick to not be poisoned.”

Havrelock speculates that states may look across the Great Lakes to Canada as a moderating force in the fight to keep the lake basin water clean and drinkable. “Many of us are hopeful of looking to Canada to set clean water standards should the Trump administration keep [cutting regulations and funds] at the national level,” she said. “We’ve always looked to this as a really positive progressive relationship for studying and managing and governing the Great Lakes, but now we are turning to the Canadians all the more.”

There is already resistance to this seachange in policy at the local level—many Republican state governors in the Great Lakes Basin have voiced unusually loud opposition to Trump’s cuts, suggesting a bipartisan eagerness at the regional level to preserve federal environmental regulations.

Havrelock said that even if the cuts do go through, she remains hopeful that states will pursue a regional solution to contain pollution and contamination. “The best case scenario is that we come up with our own Great Lakes body that determines how the water is used and how it is contaminated and that there be some kind of long-term plan that is in the best economic, public health, and social interests of the Great Lakes basin as a whole.”

The Trump administration sent its 2018 budget to Congress for review on May 23.

As promised, the budget includes broad cuts to the EPA, and the elimination of the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative and other associated projects. The budget Congress eventually passes will likely be very different from the one the Trump administration has proposed, but Frank maintains that even if the EPA scrapes by this year, there is still much work to be done to protect Lake Michigan and the Great Lakes.

“When we pollute the land, we’re now realizing that we’re impacting human life in the ecosystem,” he said. “We are forcing the polluter to pay for only one of its impacts, and even then, we aren’t fully dealing with it. Right now it’s like throwing a shovel of soil over it and say they’re done. What we really need to be focused on is environmental justice.” MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 11

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BIRDS

MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 13

When Will Divvy Be For Everyone?

The city’s bikeshare program faces stagnant growth south of Roosevelt

BY MAX BLOOM

O

ver the past year, the city’s Divvy bike share program—one of the largest in North America—has added over a hundred stations across the city, dozens of them on the South Side. A year ago, the last time the Weekly reported on Divvy’s service of the South Side, we found that South Siders accounted for just a twentieth of total riders. At that time, Divvy had recently announced its expansion, so there was some cause for optimism—perhaps the city would successfully replicate the dense network of popular stations in the North Side and portions of the West Side and the statistics would improve.

Now that the expansion has been conducted and the data has come in, the results seem to suggest that such optimism might have been premature. Ridership numbers have not meaningfully improved, and, in some neighborhoods, have actually decreased. Dozens of bike stations across the South Side go virtually unused, recording in many cases as few as a dozen or a half dozen riders every three months. The forty stations added in the South Side expansion saw a total of only about 450 rides in the winter of 2016—an average of eleven rides per station.

Meanwhile, Hyde Park, Bridgeport, and Grand Boulevard saw a decrease of almost 1900 riders. Between the winters before and after the expansion, Divvy usage on the South Side increased by a total of just seventy-one rides every three months.

The Divvy expansion, announced in January 2016, added forty stations to the South Side, along with thirty-five stations to the West Side and parts of the North Side, dramatically increasing the number of stations in Back of the Yards, Englewood and Greater Grand Crossing, while introducing the service for the first time to Avalon 14 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 31, 2017

Park, Chatham, South Chicago, and West Englewood. These seven community areas comprise seven of the nine in Chicago with the lowest ridership per station after the expansion. In the three areas where Divvy already had stations, the expansion caused ridership numbers per station to drop—by margins ranging from thirty to forty-three percent—as the additional stations perhaps diverted traffic from the existing ones. And in the three areas completely new to Divvy, the service seems to have simply not caught on— in Chatham and Avalon Park, the average station had sixteen users over a three month period; in West Englewood, six; in South Chicago, two and a half.

“The numbers in some of the newer service areas on the South and West Sides of the City have not met our expectations,” said Michael Claffey, Director of Public Affairs for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), which oversees Divvy. But, Claffey insisted, the expansions were a matter of equity. The neighborhoods were selected, said Claffey, “as part of our commitment to spreading the system across the City equitably.”

Equitability rhetoric notwithstanding, the current result is that Divvy stations see virtually no usage in a large swath of the South Side. Excluding the Near South Side, the South Side—defined in this article as the community areas south of the South Branch of the Chicago River or Stevenson Expressway—has a total of 132 stations, scattered throughout most of the area north of 83rd Street and east of Western Avenue.

The expansion has not, as of yet, reached South Side neighborhoods such as Pullman, Roseland, Beverly, Chicago Lawn, or Gage Park. Taken as a whole, this portion of the city saw just over thirty thousand Divvy

rides in the final quarter of 2016—or about 230 per station. This is about a fifth of the Chicagoland average (approximately twelve hundred rides per station, although this is skewed by the dense network of stations in the Loop and the Near North Side), and is roughly comparable with numbers found in community areas along the outskirts of the Northwest Side—neighborhoods like North Park, Irving Park, and Hermosa, into which Divvy is also expanding. But these overall low numbers obscure the matter somewhat. The reality of Divvy usage rates on the South Side is not that they are consistently low, but that they vary between neighborhoods. Divvy sees moderately high usage in a few discrete areas, moderately low usage in a handful of other areas, and virtually no usage in the majority of the South Side.

That is to say, there are areas in which statistics are promising. Hyde Park is one of the more popular community areas in the city for Divvy, and Douglas is not far behind, with the two areas boasting, respectively, around nine hundred and seven hundred riders each per station. The most popular station on the South Side is #423, facing the Regenstein Library on the campus of the University of Chicago; the second most popular station is #237, at Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and 29th, in the shadows of the Prairie Shores apartment complex. Both of these stations saw over a thousand riders in the final three months of 2016, as did several other stations in Hyde Park and stations on the campus of Illinois Institute of Technology, by Pier 31, in Chinatown, and in northern Woodlawn. And the neighborhoods around Hyde Park and adjacent to northern Bronzeville have shown relative promise: stations in Chinatown, Bridgeport, and Kenwood see ridership figures that are well below the city average

but above the average for the South Side. It’s not hard to imagine robust Divvy ridership in the near future in the relatively dense and socioeconomically diverse portions of the northern South Side, along the lakeshore north of Jackson Park, and around the UofC. However, these areas constitute just a small portion of the South Side as a whole.

Forty-five Divvy stations are in Bridgeport, Armour Square, Douglas, Hyde Park, and Kenwood. Add in the very popular station in Woodlawn at 60th and Ellis, and you have forty-six stations. Though constituting just thirty-five percent of total South Side Divvy stations, these stations account for about eighty-five percent of all South Side Divvy usage. The remaining eighty-six stations, accounting for the great majority of Divvy’s coverage of the South Side, had between them only 4800 rides in the last three months of 2016, or an average of just over fifty rides per station. There is some internal variation in this vast portion of Chicago: the Divvy station by the Garfield stop on the Green Line recorded close to four hundred rides, and stations by the DuSable Museum in Washington Park and off of Cottage Grove in Grand Boulevard also reported over a hundred rides. On the other hand, no fewer than thirty-eight stations averaged fewer than twelve rides in the fourth quarter of 2016—less than a ride a week.

These numbers suggest that the obstacles to a successful bike share program in parts of the South Side may have more to do with infrastructural inequities in South Side neighborhoods than with Divvy’s failure to offer a suitable bike network. While it could reasonably be argued last year that Divvy’s sparse network was the cause of low ridership in much of the South Side, it is no longer the case that Divvy’s network is sparse in places like Englewood, West Englewood, South Shore, and several other community areas on the South Side. Englewood, for instance, has twice as dense a grid of Divvy stations as the new expansion in Evanston, but Divvy sees forty times as much use in Evanston as it does in Englewood, or fifteen times when adjusted for population. South Shore has a similar density of stations to Logan Square, but Divvy is twenty-eight times as popular in Logan Square, or eighteen when adjusted for population.

There are a few reasons why Divvy's current methods of outreach have not yet been successful across the city. Data from 2014—before a single Divvy bike station was installed on the South Side—showed that

BIKES

DATA VISUALIZATION BY JASMINE MITHANI

neighborhoods like Hyde Park and Armour Square, where Divvy is relatively popular, had considerably higher rates of bike commuting than neighborhoods like West Englewood and Chatham, where Divvy is now struggling.

Bike lanes and infrastructure in general are sparser on the South Side than on the North or the Northwest Side—the South Side is over five times larger than the North Side by area, yet boasts eighty-six miles of bike lanes to the North Side’s sixty-one miles—and the inland portions of the South Side boast no long bike paths like the Lakefront Trail, Bloomingdale Trail, and the North Shore Channel Trail.

Black and Latinx neighborhoods have also long been subject to discriminatory ticketing practices from the Chicago Police Department, a March Tribune investigation found, prompting Black cycling activists to fight back and think about filing a lawsuit.

Another simple explanation is geographical: the West Englewood labor force, for instance, is concentrated either outside of Chicago or downtown, a pattern

mirrored by most of the South Side, so it would be infeasible for most residents to bike to work. The cost of a Divvy membership also remains out of reach for many South Siders; median household incomes are twice as high in Evanston as in Englewood, seventy percent higher in Logan Square than in South Shore, and an annual Divvy membership costs $99 a year and requires a debit or credit card—and, as Daniel Kay Hertz, a writer on urban issues, points out, is also entirely disconnected from Ventra, the city’s main transit payment system.

To that end, Divvy is attempting to address some of the socioeconomic factors at work. The Divvy for Everyone (D4E) program, for instance, allows a one-time $5 annual membership (and discounted $50 second-year memberships)—that can be paid in cash for those lacking credit or debit cards— for residents of Chicago under certain income thresholds. The D4E program is available to residents of households making below 300 percent of the federal poverty line— approximately forty eight percent of Chicago,

but according to Claffey, approximately 2,200 residents are enrolled in D4E, demonstrating significant untapped potential for D4E enrollment and relatively lackluster growth over the last year; it has grown by just 1,100 residents, according to numbers provided by the city. “The city has succeeded in making Divvy affordable,” said Claffey, “but we are still working to demonstrate Divvy’s value to some Chicagoans.”

The numbers are “encouraging, but there’s clearly a much, much bigger potential user base for whom D4E should be a great program,” Hertz, who contributes to the Weekly, said.

CDOT is at work trying to effect its demonstration, according to Claffey, referencing a “new Divvy outreach team” that would be employed “to learn from residents about the challenges they face and to educate them” about how “Divvy can be part of the solution.”

Given the low ridership associated with the expansion this past summer, it may also

be the case that Divvy would be best served by focusing investments on the portions of the South Side that already see relatively high levels of ridership but are not as saturated

by Divvy stations as Hyde Park—areas such as the side streets off MLK Drive between 20th and 40th Streets, northern Woodlawn, stations along the Green Line and the Red Line, and the lakeshore. In general, according to Hertz, the city would be well-served by building more bike lanes and trails all over the South Side in order to encourage biking and make it safer for all cyclists. In addition to helping the existing pool of cyclists on the South Side, such infrastructure might encourage more residents to try Divvy bikes or even to enroll as members. In the end, the city needs to reconcile the “conflict between increasing the ‘area served’ by Divvy and optimizing the density of Divvy stations in the areas that are served,” Hertz said—and improve Divvy service for everyone. Sam Stecklow contributed reporting.

MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 15

The Eyes, Ears, and Voices of the Parks

All public parks in Chicago can have stewards, volunteers who takes care of the wildlife and perform public outreach.

The Weekly spoke to five of them.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROHAN PATRICK MCDONALD

Alison Anastasio, Rainbow Beach Dunes Steward

Jennifer Raber, Rainbow Beach Dunes Steward

BY MAGGY LIU

“I

t’s all landfill underneath here.”

Alison Anastasio gestured to the thriving grasses around her. Orange flowers dotted the field, while waves rolled onto the beach a few feet away. “I think that that is really incredible,” she added. “Here’s a little strip of land in between a parking lot just up the street from an old steel mill, on top of slag, and it’s doing a lot of things that the ecosystems in the Indiana Dunes do.”

Anastasio is one of the stewards for Rainbow Beach Dunes (RBD), located in Rainbow Beach Park on 77th Street and South Shore Drive. As stewards of RBD, Anastasio and Jen Raber organize monthly workdays, where they lead groups of volunteers in maintaining the park by picking up litter, pulling up invasive plants, and planting seeds of native plants.

Anastasio began stewarding in 2009, as she was finishing her PhD degree in ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago.

Once she had the time to explore the nature around the city, Anastasio fell in love with

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the dunes that characterize the Calumet region. After learning about the stewardship program from a friend, Anastasio reached out to the Chicago Park District. “I didn’t know there was such a good-looking dune habitat [here],” she said, as she first learned about RBD when the Parks District gave her a list of sites that needed stewards.

Anastasio revitalized the stewardship program at RBD by reaching out to both the local community and Chicago’s wider network of nature organizations, building up a core group of volunteers.

Two years ago, Anastasio emailed the RBD mailing list for help with stewardship responsibilities. Between working full-time as a dean for the UofC’s MD-PhD program and organizing workdays by herself, she needed support. Raber, who had previously volunteered at RBD a few times, responded.

After volunteering at parks across Chicago, Raber wanted to be more deeply involved with Chicago’s nature sites. “Showing up as a volunteer is fun and everything, but it’s

more of an enriching, deeper experience when you’re responsible for the site,” she said.

RBD is a relatively new nature area, as the entire lakeside area used to be a manicured beach. In 2004, the Park District found that marram grass, one of the few plants that can grow on open sand, was growing on the beach. As marram grass is important in allowing for developing and stabilizing dune ecosystems, the Park District designated part of the beach as a natural area to support the growth of diverse plant species.

For Anastasio, who lives on the Far South Side, the most rewarding part of stewardship is “interacting with people who didn’t know that this was here, especially people that live in the neighborhood.”

Local engagement has increased since 2009, thanks in part to Anastasio’s early efforts in community outreach. RBD now has partnerships with local high schools and receives about one hundred volunteers each year. RBD has also expanded its programming beyond workdays, partnering with the Bird Conservation Network to host bird-watching walks.

Raber lives near Montrose Beach and values how stewarding allows her to build a strong relationship with a nature site. “If I weren’t a steward, if I were just being a normal volunteer, even if it was Montrose or someplace near my house, I just feel like I wouldn’t have that deeper connection.”

Raber and Anastasio want to share RBD with even more people in the future. “I feel like it still slides under the radar a little bit,” Raber says. “I just want to expose people [to RBD] and have them have a good experience,” Anastasio said, “and if we can get some weeds pulled, that’s great.”

PARKS

Katie Flores, McKinley Park Steward

to pass at all. Supported by the McKinley Park Advisory Council (MPAC), Flores put together an extensive documentation of all the problems existing in the park in the form of an interactive map and presented it at a Chicago Park District budget meeting. Her efforts paid off—although the renovation was already in the budget, the Park District decided to double the allotted amount for improvements. “It was awesome. We felt very triumphant with that,” Flores said.

Heather Breems, the other steward leading the stewardship program in McKinley Park, explained why the Park District became more willing to invest in the neighborhood: “They [the Park District] know there’s a community that’s also invested in it.”

It all started six years ago, when Breems’s family first moved to the neighborhood. “We lived right by the park. The playground was really old and run-down, and I was like, ‘Oh, there’s got to be a way to fix that and get a new one.’” So Breems co-founded MPAC with several other parents in the neighborhood with an initial focus on renovating the playground.

Flores joined MPAC two years ago.

Last year, she and Breems decided to start a stewardship program in McKinley Park after Flores, MPAC’s vice president at the time, learned that many of the natural areas within the Park District did not have such programs, including their neighborhood’s own sixtynine-acre park.

“At the beginning, we did monthly workdays where we cleaned up garbage or planted,” Flores said. They now hold a variety of events on a more frequent basis, such as the biweekly stewardship days, when neighbors are invited to join them in planting and even bird watching in the park.

The stewardship holds personal importance for Breems and her family. Living right across the street, they treat the park as their backyard—they frequently picked up trash and garbage even before becoming official stewards. “It’s something that my whole family can do and we enjoy doing,” Breems said. Whether it is spotting a real snake slithering around the bush or seeing a nest of baby ducks that are just starting to hatch, she always gets excited whenever she discovers a piece of nature: “It’s so great to live in the city but have access to that.”

Flores is proud of her stewardship because it helps others “foster a sense of pride in their neighborhood.” In addition to stewarding, she currently works with elementary school teachers through the UofC’s STEM Education program. She writes pre-school math curriculum and coaches elementary school teachers in their math practice.

At the end of the workday, several kids were eagerly describing to their parents the birds they had seen. While Flores collected their binoculars, neighbors shared the rest of their weekend and Mother’s Day plans. “I’ve got baseball all day!” she said, referring to her five-year-old son’s baseball season. “Mama’s gotta wear her sunscreen!”

on, he adds, “I don’t think they’re birders. No binoculars.”

A longtime Hyde Park resident, Jerry Levy has been Wooded Island’s faithful steward for the past eight years, volunteering on the side of an ongoing career in civil law.

Levy first began to think about entering park conservation after years of crosscountry skiing in Jackson Park. He is now a Master Treekeeper, a Master Gardener, and a certified herbicide applicator, thanks to a series of courses he’s chosen to take at the University of Illinois Extension since accepting the position. Still, Levy says his knowledge level is at “one one-hundredth of some of the people around here.” His own learning process continues to this day with regularly scheduled meetings with Parks Department staff to discuss developments or study new techniques in conservation.

Across Chicago’s wide range of neighborhoods and communities, stewardship can take on a variety of appearances. Levy describes his role as the “eyes and ears of the park.” As we stand in front of a sprawling 300-year old oak, he details the growth history apparent from its shape, and it occurs to me that Levy is

certainly Wooded Island’s voice as well.

Levy’s role in the Parks Department structure, as a steward uniquely adjusted to Wooded Island, is to facilitate the threeway relationship among Park District officials, the general public, and the island itself. Beyond easing communication between park visitors and park employees, Levy is the bridge between the plants and the people. Levy spends hours alone at Wooded Island each week, observing and interacting with the park. When he has company in the form of volunteers or school groups, he shares stories about the land and trees that would otherwise go unheard.

He teaches me about how May is migratory season, the ideal time to see the dozens of bird species that spend their springs and summers at Wooded Island, a small haven nestled within Jackson Park. A few seconds of standing on the island are all that is needed for confirmation. Bright yellow warblers, some barely the size of a large oak leaf, dot the trees and sky. They are not difficult to spot, but I have never seen them before. As we continue walking he names tree after tree, starting with Bur

Oak #34, and shows how to identify tricky species of invasive plants, consulting small pages of cursive notes for reference.

During each month’s Wooded Island Work Day, occurring every fourth Saturday, Levy teaches plant-identification to a group of volunteers and visitors. The remainder of May’s plans include his granddaughter’s first-grade class from the Lab School stopping by to see the birds, and a group of seventh graders coming to measure the island’s many rapidly-growing saplings.

Levy tells me the saplings have grown substantially; he expects they will be nearly twice the width they were last year.

A bridge across the West Lagoon connects Wooded Island to the rest of Jackson Park. At the foot of it, a man stands with a fishing pole. “He’s not supposed to do that,” Levy remarks as we approach, explaining that while this was a popular fishing spot years ago, all the fish are long gone from the water. Fishing is now technically, although perhaps unnecessarily, banned. I wonder if I’m about to witness park discipline being handed down, but as we pass, all that happens is the man waves and nods, and Levy waves back. ¬

Heather Breems, McKinley Park Steward

BY LORRAINE LU

“W

e just spent eight hours and that earned 75,000 dollars.

That’s crazy!” Katie Flores exclaimed, referring to the sidewalk she was standing on. It’s one of the pathways around the lagoon in McKinley Park that was renovated last year after a proposal made by her to improve McKinley Park.

Before Flores’s proposal, these gravel paths were so degraded that, on rainy days, pedestrians and strollers wouldn’t be able

Jerry Levy, Jackson Park Wooded Island Steward

BY SARAH FINEMAN

“H

ow ya doing?” said Jerry Levy, volunteer steward of Wooded Island in Jackson Park, to a group in business attire passing by. It’s how he has greeted everyone during our walk on a sunny mid-May morning, from rangers in a pickup truck to a jogger to a man lying down in the sun. As this group continues

MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 17

Greener Pastures

What the history of Jackson Park tells us about its uncertain future

BY MICHAEL WASNEY

“P

arks are for people,” Frances Vandervoort told me. A board member and Committee Chairman of the Hyde Park Historical Society, she holds a similar position on the Jackson Park Advisory Council ( JPAC), a watchdog organization for the South Side park of the same name. That’s what I’ve come to talk with Vandervoort about: the changes that will soon come to Jackson Park.

The first signs of these changes are visible even today—a nonprofit called Project 120 Chicago, in partnership with the Chicago Park District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), has partially underwritten a series of revitalization projects taking place in the park since 2013.

These are forerunners of more significant changes to come: the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) is slotted to open in Jackson Park in 2021, and the Tiger Woods– designed revitalization of the Jackson Park and South Shore Golf Courses—which will combine them into one PGA-grade course, and will be financed through a public-private partnership—is expected to be completed by 2020. Both projects have been sources of controversy.

Before talking about either project, Vandervoort shows me a copy of a map of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, which took place in Jackson Park and on the Midway Plaisance, two components of the tripartite South Park System, with Washington Park being the third.

Her turn to the past is a useful one: in order to understand much of the rhetoric surrounding the Jackson Park projects, a consideration of the park’s founding is necessary. After all, everyone is talking about it: in public statements and on their respective websites, Project 120, the Obama Foundation, and TGR Design (Tiger Woods’s firm) have all invoked the vision of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the park’s designer, or at least the 1893 Columbian Exposition he had a hand in designing, 18 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 31, 2017

Olmsted’s vision was anchored as much in the physical landscape of Chicago as in its social one. Parks, for Olmsted, were more than just natural space: they were essential organs of morality and democracy, which he sought to bring to the expanding industrial labor class of Chicago. So Vandervoort’s assertion that “parks are for people” was a twofold allusion: to recent concerns about the undemocratic process by which the District has approved these Jackson Park projects, but also to the egalitarian philosophy of Jackson Park’s designer.

Project 120, the Obama Foundation, and TGR Designs aren’t the only ones invoking Olmsted’s name. Organizations opposing the OPC and the Tiger Woods golf course have worries that the oncoming— and arguably incongruous—changes threaten the “character” that Olmsted initially envisioned for the parks. Which raises the questions: what was Olmsted’s vision? And can a proper understanding of it give us perspective on the debates that Jackson Park is embroiled in today?

The early years: the South Park Commission, Olmsted, and the Transcendentalist Vision In 1869, Paul Cornell—founder of Hyde Park Village, which would remain separate from Chicago until the 1880s—and others pushed the South Park Bill through the Illinois State Legislature. According to Cornell, the bill would bring “lungs to the great city and its future generations.” The South Park Bill and a number of others inspired by it set up park commissions around Chicagoland, including the South Park Commission (all would be combined into the Chicago Park District during the Great Depression). The following year, the South Park Commission contracted Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux to design the South Park System.

More than just an architect, Olmsted was a moralist. He believed that space,

nature, and human movement could have an uplifting effect on the human spirit. And contrary to prevailing opinion amongst European visitors to the U.S., who deemed the still-infant country uncivil, Olmsted had great faith in America’s people. Through the development of the physical landscape, Olmsted sought their social development—a type of spiritual enlightenment through nature that he thought was becoming less attainable under the labor conditions of the modern city. He thought much about the dehumanizing and demoralizing effects of the industrialism that was taking root in America, particularly in cities like Chicago: Olmsted, Vaux & Co.’s report to the South Park Commission in 1871 said that the park was intended for everyone, but in particular for the “thousands of the very class of citizens whose convenience most needs to be considered...the toiling population of Chicago.”

Olmsted’s democratic vision of parks was influenced by transcendentalist thinkers like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose philosophy posited that an enlightened state of being could be found in nature. Olmsted was known to frequent the lectures of Emerson, who taught that nature had a sublime power and that contact with it could help people achieve spiritual understanding.

For Olmsted, the lake was what gave the South Park System its sublime quality; otherwise, he was unimpressed with the landscape. Back then, Jackson Park was essentially swamp and dune, and everything west of the dunes was monotonously flat, apparently the “first obvious defect of the site.” The lake, on the other hand, was something special: “There is but one object of scenery near Chicago of special grandeur or sublimity, and that, the Lake, can be made by artificial means no more grand or sublime.” Olmsted and Vaux wanted to use lake water to unite the entire South Park System into one comprehensive unit. They designed a system of waterways and canals

to do so, inspired by the Lido in Venice.

Lake water would be channeled into a lagoon located in the “Lower Division” (now Jackson Park); this would connect to a basin running the length of the “Middle Division” (now the Midway Plaisance); the basin would pour into “the Mere” (now the Washington Lagoon), located in the “Upper Division” (now Washington Park).

“It locks the three divisions of the Park into one obvious system, so that their really disjointed character will be much less impressed upon the minds of observers passing through them,” Olmsted, Vaux & Co.’s 1871 report stated.

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed the South Park Commission’s office, and with it with most of Olmsted and Vaux’s drafts. Plans had to be reconstructed from memory, and progress on the project largely came to a halt. A year later, the project was given over to H.W.S. Cleveland, an associate of Olmsted. Cleveland was told to minimize the parts of Olmsted’s design that required too much topographical alteration, ostensibly for economic reasons. This meant that the basin of the Middle Division and the lagoon in the Lower Division were not to be. By 1874, most of Washington Park was open and had become quite popular among city and suburban residents alike.

In contrast, Jackson Park and the Midway underwent only modest development before the 1890s. The World’s Fair of 1893 would provide the impetus to change that, however.

Olmsted and the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition The World’s Fair was announced in 1891. Daniel Burnham, whose own architectural legacy is embedded in Chicago’s landscape, was named Chief Architect of the fair, and he appointed Olmsted (without Vaux) as its Landscape Architect. Olmsted didn’t initially envision the fair taking place on Jackson Park and

PARKS

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY

Above: Within a year of the World’s Columbian Exhibition’s closure, a large fire razed most of the buildings, which gave Olmsted the opportunity in 1895 to create this revised general plan for Jackson Park—a waterway system that would connect Jackson Park through a canal running down the Midway to Washington Park.

Left: A mock-up of a potential layout for the Obama Presidential Center presented at the unveiling event, which took place at the South Shore Cultural Center.

COURTESY OF THE OBAMA FOUNDATION

the Midway. North Side sites like Garfield and Lincoln Park were also candidates, but were ultimately ruled out by the Exposition Authority due to the South Park System’s superior public transportation lines. The South Park Commission lobbied hard to get the Authority to select Jackson Park

and the Midway over the already developed Washington Park; the fair meant an opportunity—in the form of an influx of capital—to finally finish Jackson Park. For Olmsted, it meant the revival of his original vision of a Venetian-style pleasure ground in Chicago.

Well, not quite: the South Park System never quite became the sylvan escape from the city that Olmsted had originally imagined. Rather, Jackson Park and the Midway were cluttered with the exhibits and attractions of the fair.

Olmsted expressed particular distaste for development on the Midway—which did not have the water basin he had proposed in the 1871 plan—in a paper published in the Inland Architect. “We did not suppose that there would be many small buildings

scattered about between the main great buildings...Afterward they were seen to be financially desirable.”

Economic reasons were at play with the Midway as they were with Wooded Island, about which Olmsted also expressed concerns. Wooded Island was not included in the original plans for South Park, but was seen as a necessary escape from the bustle of the fair. As he wrote to Inland Architect, he intended Wooded Island to be “free from buildings and from all objects that would prevent it from presenting, in connection with the adjoining waters, a broad space, characterized by calmness and naturalness, to serve as a foil to the artificial grandeur and sumptuousness of the other parts of the scenery.” The installment of the Japanese Ho-o-oden temple and gardens was therefore the best outcome of a bad scenario. “We became convinced that it would be impossible to resist these demands ...[to use Wooded Island for] a great variety of purposes,” Olmsted wrote. “We were fortunate in securing the occupation of the island only by the temple and garden of the Japanese...Nevertheless, we consider that these introductions have much injured the island.” This development of the Wooded Island was also the result of moneyed interests; Japanese investment in the fair was second only to that of Germany.

Despite his qualms, Olmsted was ultimately satisfied with the Exposition, and grew to be famous for his work on it.

Within a year of the fair’s closure, a series of fires razed almost everything to the ground, giving Olmsted the opportunity in 1895 to redesign Jackson Park. Once again he tried to unite the South Park System into one comprehensive public park. And true to form, he again suggested that it be a waterway system to unite the three parks. Although the Commission began construction on the Midway for the canal he proposed, it was never finished, leaving a large dip in the Plaisance that still exists today. Olmsted and his sons undertook a number of other projects in the parks, most of which no longer exist. A music pavilion, for example, was installed on the northeast bank of the lagoon, where, more recently, Project 120 has proposed the construction of a new music pavilion.

Although Olmsted’s pavilion is no longer, Jackson Park’s eighteen-hole golf course— one of the first public golf courses in the Midwest, designed in 1900 by John C. Olmsted, Olmsted’s nephew and adopted son—is still there today.

MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 19

PARKS

The South Park System has changed considerably since Olmsted’s time. Some changes occurred suddenly: the original Ho-o-oden temple fell victim to arson in 1946, although the Garden of the Phoenix, added to the site in the 1930s as the Osaka Garden, remains. Others faced resistance from residents, to varying degrees of success: in 1959, protesters chained themselves to trees to (successfully) block Mayor Richard J. Daley’s reroute of Lake Shore Drive through Jackson Park. Protesters failed, however, to block the construction of a golf driving range in 1978. Vandervoort herself was present at these protests. Beyond a significant architectural history, the South Park System has a history of organizing and dissent. It’s a tradition that continues today.

Fast Forward: Project 120, the OPC, and the Golf Course Revitalization Project Fast forward to the present day, I take a stroll over to Wooded Island, a location that has recently been the focus of public outcry.

It’s my first time back since Project 120 Chicago—whose signs are posted all over— began their restoration of the area in 2013.

Adjacent to the Garden of the Phoenix stands Yoko Ono’s lotus-shaped sculpture, Skylanding, which was also underwritten by Project 120.

A South Shore resident named Ken who said he has been visiting Jackson Park since he was a teen told me that “it doesn’t look too different,” making him wonder whether it was worth all of “the time it took and the money that was spent.” Much of the money has gone into the Great Lakes Fisheries and Ecosystem Restoration (GLFER) project’s restoration efforts on the northern end of the Lagoon—less visible projects like reseeding native plants and monitoring fish communities in the lagoon. The GLFER project falls under the domain of the Project 120’s partnership with the Park District and USACE. In an open letter to the Hyde Park Herald, Vandervoort wrote that she deemed the techniques used by GLFER to be “the very best of ecological restoration.”

Some are more skeptical, not just about Project 120, but about all of the changes that have been proposed for Jackson Park.

When I asked Ken what he has heard about the Obama Presidential Center (OPC), his answer was telling: “I was at an alderman’s meeting...It seemed like nobody knew what 20 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY

¬ MAY 31, 2017

was going on.” Ken is not alone in his concern that “the alderman didn’t have any answers.”

A few organizations have coalesced around this perceived lack of transparency in the the Park District’s decision-making process for Jackson Park. These organizations allege that secrecy has shrouded not just the decision-making process for the OPC, but Project 120’s restoration and the golf course revitalization as well.

Many fear that the precedent set

by Project 120—already well under development by the time the library and the golf course were announced—will be a forerunner of things to come. Chief among these parties is Friends of the Parks (FOTP), a watchdog group that monitors the Park District’s activities. These activites have increasingly taken the form of publicprivate partnerships, as wtih GLFER project. The introduction of private capital has caused some—Juanita Irizarry, executive director of FOTP, for one—to worry that moneyed interests have usurped democracy in decision-making about the parks.

“If we have parks where so much of the money to develop the park comes from private sources as we see happening more and more, do these private sources then want to control the use of these parks?”

Irizarry asked. Referencing Project 120, she said, “There’s been some challenges in transparency...it was hard to figure out if this was a Park District project, if this is a Project 120 idea, and if the community doesn’t like it...is it already a done deal?”

FOTP works to give communities political sway over their parks, in part by helping them form Park Advisory Councils (PACs), which are community groups that advocate for the needs of their local park.

They began cropping up in the 1980s—a few years after FOTP was founded in 1975—after the U.S. Department of Justice sued the Chicago Park District for its racist neglect of minority communities. As a result, a 1983 court-ordered consent decree required the District to create a system by which the public could hold government accountable for park spending. FOTP was contracted to help implement this system, which it did by recommending the PAC model. They have helped to establish about 200 PACs; JPAC, founded immediately after the 1983 court order, was one of the first. Some members of JPAC—for example, Vandervoort—are more supportive of Project 120 than is FOTP. Project 120’s discussions with the

District about building the Phoenix Pavilion and music court on the northeast bank of the lagoon, where Olmsted’s pavilion once was, were ultimately stymied by community backlash. Irizarry credits a new organization on the scene, the Jackson Park Watch ( JPW), for this disruption. “[The District] had a little opposition from the Jackson Park Watch, so it seems as if that opposition has slowed some things down,” she said.

Brenda Nelms and Margaret Schmid founded JPW last year primarily as an information-gathering organization, distributing knowledge that they believed the community had a right to know. For example, they filed a FOIA request with the Chicago Parks’ District earlier this year and found that, in return for a $700,000 capital investment, the District had signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Project 120 that “gave Project 120 control over the north end of Wooded Island and the part of the park surrounding the lagoon,” Schmid told me. The MOU can now be found on JPW’s website.

Organization like JPW and FOTP are concerned that the non-transparent and undemocratic precedent set by Project 120 will be an issue with the OPC and the golf course as well, particularly worrisome because of the risk of gentrification that the latter two projects could bring. In a recent presentation, Obama said he hopes the center will turn Jackson Park into something of a Millennium or Lincoln Park, or, in Nelms’s words—“congested, carnivalesque, programmed”—a tourist attraction without regard for the needs of local residents.

“I don’t think any of us have anything against...bringing economic development to the community,” she said, but she adds still “concerned for the community in the area that has worries they might be displaced.”

“It’s not an improvement [to the park] for the folks who live nearby if they can’t live nearby anymore,” she said. Making sure the surrounding community has a say in how the project unfolds will be FOTP’s role until the OPC is unveiled in 2021.

Irizarry sees a direct connection between the OPC and the golf course revitalization project. But the promise of economic development has been polarizing.

“We hear from folks who are excited about what they perceive to be economic development,” Irizarry said. “And we hear from people who are afraid that they will no longer be able to golf here at a lower price

as they do now.” The city has reassured the public that the revitalized golf courses will be subsidized for local residents; as of now, however, the amount by which the price per round will increase is uncertain.

Among those who use Jackson Park, opinion is similarly split about the two projects. Ken affirmed that he was concerned about “gentrification—is it going to make [the area] more expensive for the people?” he asked. When I spoke with a group of three golfers over at the Jackson Park Golf Course, they seemed excited about both projects, although a bit skeptical about whether the necessary capital will materialize to make the golf course revitalization happen. Nonetheless, they seemed excited about the economic development it could bring. “Once the golf course comes in, then private enterprise will figure out how to fill in the rest,” Edward Singleton said. Albany Devers added that private enterprise is “going to improve [the neighborhood].” But Singleton and Devers were not residents of the Kenwood/ Hyde Park/South Shore area; rather, they had commuted in from their homes in the suburbs.

The Olmsted Legacy Today Many of the issues surrounding the park projects today were immaterial in Olmsted’s time. “He would not recognize today’s world,” Irizarry reminded me.

Nonetheless, Olmsted’s legacy—and the legacy of his contribution to the Columbian Exposition—are cited by almost all of the actors doing work in Jackson Park today (take a look at their websites), which means the designer’s intentions are more than relevant. I turned to Victoria Post Ranney, a well-known Olmsted scholar and the author of Olmsted in Chicago, for input.

Ranney thinks it’s important “for Jackson Park to be really revitalized.”

Despite the heated resistance with which the proposed changes have met, Ranney told me she didn’t “think that we should think of Olmsted Parks as something that should never change.” Nor are the projects being implemented today necessarily incongruous with those Olmsted undertook more than a century ago: after all, Project 120’s music pavilion would have occupied the location of the one he installed in 1895.

Between the two projects that are cued to arrive in coming years, Ranney spoke favorably of the OPC. “[Olmsted] would

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have been, I think, delighted to see the kind of president Obama turned out to be, and he would have probably loved to work on this project himself,” she said. About the golf course revitalization she was less sure: “He would not like it if access was reduced by making a golf course into something that was exclusively for people that had a lot of money to pay for it.” She added an additional concern about the golf course: the question of the “effects around it,” the same concern shared by Ken and others regarding the OPC. But for the golf course that question is even harder to answer: the course revitalization project has no business plan as of yet, making it difficult to tell what development will result from the revitalization.

I think that the transcendentalist in Olmsted would be wary of anything that could detract from the naturalism of a park. Naturalism, he believed, offered an important offset to the industrialized and developed character of city life. As many watchdogs have noted, the OPC would take away green space, as would have Project 120’s music pavilion. Ease of physical accessibility to the park was also important to Olmsted, something that development today poses a threat to: it remains unclear how the designers of the OPC and the golf course revitalization plan to accommodate for the inundation of traffic their projects will bring. But Olmsted saw value in a developed and programmed park, as well.

The 1873 implementation of his Washington Park plan included amenities like pony rides and equipment-stocked sporting fields. The “Revised General Plan for Jackson Park” of 1895 included, amongst other things, a music court on the northeast bank of the lagoon. More than a century later, Project 120 had initiated talks to design a music pavilion in the same location.

As Ranney reminds me, it’s all “speculation.” It’s impossible to put words in the mouth of a man who’s beyond the grave.

Nonetheless, she believes certain facets of Olmsted’s vision speak for themselves. “I think that the great constants in Olmsted parks are getting people in touch with...real nature.” But she wonders who will be able to benefit from this vision in the coming years. “One of the other things that was very important to [Olmsted] was access, by all of the people.” And this, she said, was her “worry” about the future of the South Park System. ¬

BULLETIN National Trails Day Burnham Wildlife Corridor, check the website for meeting addresses. Saturday, June 3, 10am–12pm. bit.ly/NationalTrails Help restore nature trails near the gathering spaces of the Burnham Wildlife Corridor, the one-hundred-acre strip of lakefront public green space running from McCormick Place to 47th Street.

Volunteers will be provided with tools and gloves—and the chance to learn more about new changes to the corridor. (David Struett)

Telling Our Stories Workshop Crerar Memorial Presbyterian Church, 8100 S. Calumet Ave. Saturday, June 3, 10am– 2:30pm. Free. bit.ly/CrerarWorkshop Storytelling lets us pass down truths and articulate our experiences and hopes.

Learn how to tell your own story with presentations by WBEZ’s Natalie Moore and writers Elizabeth Rivera and Kevin Coval. Come by, whether young or old— kids ages eleven to seventeen will attend a different workshop than adults. (David Struett)

Putting Me 1st Sundays with Sandria: Community Yoga Bronzeville Incubator, 300 E. 51st St. Sunday, June 4, 11am–12:15pm. Free. (312) 256-7137. bit.ly/SandriaYoga Treat yourself to a fresh start this summer with free yoga sessions by certified instructor Sandria Washington.

Washington has partnered with GirlTrek, the largest nonprofit focused on health among African-American women and girls, to put on this event. Beginners are invited, and be sure to bring your mat. (David Struett)

The Road to Abolition: Workshop on Prison Industrial Complex American Friends Service Committee, 637 S. Dearborn St. Thursday, June 8, 6pm–9pm. chicagobond.org Jess Heaney, an organizer with Critical Resistance, will lead an introductory

workshop on prison industrial complex abolition. Hosted by the Chicago Community Bond Fund, this event is co-sponsored by Assata’s Daughters, Black Lives Matter Chicago, Invisible 2 Invincible: Asian Pacific Islander Pride of Chicago, Organized Communities Against Deportations (OCAD), and more.

Light refreshments will be provided. (Rod Sawyer)

So Fresh Saturday Tour Lindblom Park, 6054 S. Damen Ave. Saturday, June 3, 3pm–7pm. (866) 8451032. bit.ly/SoFreshSaturday Now back for its fifth year, join the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.) for this free, family-friendly, and resident-driven festival.

There will be performances, workshops, and various resources available—and R.A.G.E is still looking for more performers and participants. (Rod Sawyer)

VISUAL ARTS Curators Create Bridgeport Art Center, 1200 W. 35th St. Through July 7. Monday–Saturday, 8am– 6pm, Sunday, 8am–12pm.(773) 843-9000. bridgeportart.com Curators Create, which opened two weeks ago, showcases the work of the artists that curate some of Chicago’s great art galleries.

See work from Mary Ellen Croteau, Charles Gniech, Dolores Mercado, and others. As there are many more artist/ curators in the area who could be featured in an event like this, Curators Create could become a biannual event at the art center.

(Adia Robinson)

“A Constant Struggle” Panel Discussion: Strategies for Empowering Youth of Color Beverly Art Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, May 31, 7pm. (773) 445-3838. beverlyarts.org Housed within the Beverly Area Arts Alliance’s ongoing art exhibition on the legacy of ongoing racism in present-day inequality, this panel discussion will deal with one part of that legacy. Featuring

individuals involved in social justice movements, social services, and teaching and youth programming, the panel will be moderated by Kathleen McInerney, a Saint Xavier professor who studies privilege and education policy. ( Julia Aizuss)

Out & Out with QPOC: Queer Storytelling Hyde Park Art Center, 5020 S. Cornell Ave. Thursday, June 1, 6pm–8pm. (773) 3245520. hydeparkart.org QPOC DePaul, a student organization providing space for queer people of color at DePaul, presents a night of “unapologetic queerness” in this storytelling event.

This night will be full of both visual and performance art that shows the lived experience of queer people of color. (Adia Robinson)

Young, Latinx & Proud: Latinx Uniting for Real Justice Rudy Lozano Chicago Public Library, 1805 S. Loomis St. Saturday, June 3, 1pm–2:30pm. bit.ly/YLPJustice Join the group Young, Latinx & Proud (YLP) as they host this event to build a platform for justice and radical transformation. YLP strives to build solidarity and empower those of the Latinx community, as well as to engage in dialogue with fellow marginalized communities.

(Roderick Sawyer)

First Saturdays at Mana Mana Contemporary, 2233 S. Throop St. Saturday, June 3, 1pm–4pm. (312) 8500555. manacontemporarychicago.com This month, Mana Contemporary’s First Saturdays debuts a variety of new work: aside from select open studios, visitors can watch three video installations from the Body + Camera Festival, listen to an artist talk at 2pm with Zakkiyyah Najeebah, and view High Concept Labs’s featured artist Andy Slater perform his Sound as Sight project. ( Julia Aizuss)

We Real Cool: A Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks’s 100th Birthday National Museum of Mexican Art, 1852 W. MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 21

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19th St. Monday, June 5, 6:30pm–7:30pm. poetryfoundation.org View the premiere of Manual Cinema’s video honoring Gwendolyn Brooks.

This event will be held close to the onehundredth birthday of Brooks ( June 7, 1917). Manual Cinema’s video uses illuminative paper-cut puppetry to embody Brooks’s landmark poem “We Real Cool,” and serves as a companion to an upcoming live production about Brooks. (Rod Sawyer)

MUSIC DJ MASEO The Promontory, 5311 S. Lake Park Ave. Friday, June 2, 10pm. $15-$40. 21+. (312) 801-2100. promontorychicago.com Flashback First Friday is presenting DJ Maseo, a rapper and DJ who is one of the three members of hip-hop group, De La Soul. Maseo will be performing with Joe Kollege and Mark Flava, two other DJs. Guests have the option to book a five-person VIP table that includes bottle service for $350. (Mira Chauhan)

The Dwarves and JFA Reggies, 2105 S. State St. Friday, June 2, 8pm. $20 in advance; $25 day of show. 17+.

(312) 949-0120. reggieslive.com Experience two firsts in this Friday’s hardcore show at Reggies: the Dwarves playing the entirety of their thirteen-track 1997 album “The Dwarves are Young and Good Looking” live for the first time, and JFA’s first performance in Chicago in twenty years. (Adia Robinson)

emotion. Experience this and an opening set from Frazey Ford this Wednesday. (Adia Robinson)

Los Punks Tambien Bailan The Dojo, send Facebook message for address.

Saturday, June 10, 8pm–12am. Donation suggested. facebook.com/thedojochi To raise funds for this year’s Black and Brown Punk Show, which will take place at Pilsen’s Chi-Futbol Arena in August, the Dojo will be hosting a night of music and much more. Hear the punk sounds of Los MF Mariachis, thrash metal by Reign, and Sonidero y Mas by DJ Solmeca, check out a dance performance by Mz Mr and art installations by Sebastián Hidalgo and Katia Perez, watch a live mural painting

by Alvaro Zavala, and peruse the tabling vendors. There will also be tamales, jerk chicken tacos, and a cash bar featuring wine and margaritas. (Andrew Koski)

STAGE & SCREEN Maurice Sendak’s Tales from the Brothers Grimm The Revival, 1160 E. 55th St. Wednesday, May 31, 6pm. $5. (866) 811-4111. the-revival.com The Revival will stage a live reading of Maurice Sendak’s take on the Brothers Grimm’s notoriously dark “Fairy Tales.” You might recognize Sendak from the iconic classic Where the Wild Things Are, where the wild rumpus started. The Hyde Park improv group says it’s appropriate for ages seven and up. ( Joseph S. Pete)

Birds of Chicago

Brooks Day@Nite: Praise & Jubilation

Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St. Wednesday May 31, 6:30pm doors, 7:30pm show. $22 in advance; $25 day of show. (312) 526-3851. thaliahallchicago.com

Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th St. Wednesday, June 7, 6pm. Free, tickets reserved in advance recommended. (773) 324-4844. brooksday.org

Can’t get enough of Chicago birds? Come on down to Thalia Hall for a night of music from some Chicago birds of a different feather. For Birds of Chicago, “every note counts.” This collective, built around Allison Russel and JT Nero, uses “elemental imagery” and a music style drawn from gospel to make its audience feel a wash of

Join in the centennial birthday celebration of the U.S.’s first Black Pulitzer Prize– winner for literature, as well as Illinois’s most longstanding poet laureate, the one and only Gwendolyn Brooks. BrooksDay@ Nite is the culmination of an entire year of literary events honoring the rich life and legacy of the South Side’s own cultural

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treasure, Our Miss Brooks. Friends and fans will gather as one hundred presenters (including the Weekly’s own Stage and Screen Editor) share a variety of oneminute presentations ranging from poetry readings to dance, visual arts, and digital crafts. Some of the other featured presenters include Haki Madhubuti, Patricia Smith, Nora Brooks Blakely, Nate Marshall, and Maggie Brown. And yes, it is a birthday celebration, so there will be cake!

(Nicole Bond)

An Evening at the Pekin Theater Northwest corner of 27th St. and S. State St. Saturday, June 17, 7pm. Free, RSVP required.

(312) 422-5580. ilhumanities.org Reconvene nearly 112 years to the day of Chicago’s famed Pekin Theater’s first live performance. Nicknamed the “Temple of Music,” the Pekin Theater was the first Black-owned and -operated stock theater company in the U.S. The Pekin’s first all-Black show, the first in Chicago, opened to a crowd of about 400 on June 18, 1905. This live outdoor concert, featuring award-winning pianist Reginald Robinson and directed by Cheryl Lynn Bruce, will reimagine the golden ragtime era in the heart of Bronzeville. (Nicole Bond)

Moonlight at the Beverly Arts Cinema Center Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St. Wednesday, June 7, 7pm. $9.50, members $7.50. (773) 445-3838. beverlyartcenter.org This week BAC Film Coordinator Jonathan Moeller will be hosting a screening of the Academy Award–winning Best Picture of 2016, Moonlight. This moving comingof-age story chronicles the life of a gay African-American man growing up in Miami—if you still haven’t yet seen it, now is the time. (Roderick Sawyer)

Yo-Yo Ma Peace Concert St. Sabina Church, 1210 W. 78th Pl. Sunday, June 11, 4pm. $20. (312) 294-3000. cso.org/concertforpeace Join cellist Yo-Yo Ma, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and the Children’s Choir for a music concert presented in partnership with Saint Sabina’s that celebrates and promotes peace within Chicago. This

program will include work by Dvořák, Joplin and Ellington. All donations and net ticket proceeds will benefit Saint Sabina’s anti-violence and “Strong Futures” employment programs. (Roderick Sawyer)

Funny Grabs Back: Future Ties Pinwheel Records, 1722 W. 18th St. Friday, June 2, 8pm–11pm. Free, purchase of raffle tickets encouraged. $5, $20 for five tickets.

The Ladylike Project, a network that partners local artists with local community organizations, is coming to Pilsen with a comedy-afterschool programming duo.

With Brittany Meyer headlining and Shirley Blazen hosting, several standup comedians will bring their talents to support Future Ties, which runs afterschool and summer programming for kids in Parkway Gardens, a Greater Grand Crossing apartment complex “hit particularly hard by gun violence.” ( Julia Aizuss)

Among All This You Stand Like A Fine Brownstone eta Creative Arts Foundation, 7558 S. South Chicago Ave. Through Thursday, June 8.

Fridays, Saturdays, 8pm; Sundays, 3pm. $40, discounts available for seniors, students, and groups. (773) 752-3955. etacreativearts.org Enjoy this revival tribute that celebrates the life of Vantile L. Whitfield as well as, of course, the Gwendolyn Brooks centennial.

First performed to acclaim at eta back in the nineties, you now have a second chance to watch sketchbook vignettes of Black life come to together through Whitfield’s adaptations of poetry by Gwendolyn Brooks—don’t miss out. (Roderick Sawyer)

Harvey Court Theatre, 5535 S. Ellis Ave. Through June 11. $15-$68. (773) 753-4472. courttheatre.org Long before there was Donnie Darko or Wilfred, there was Mary Chase’s 1944 Pulitzer Prize-winning play Harvey. The titular character is an invisible rabbit that stands six feet and three inches tall and may end up imprisoning the “carefree and kind” protagonist Elwood P. Dowd in a sanitarium. ( Joseph S. Pete)

HHH

“juicy and resonanT” – Chicago Tribune

“sCorCHinG” – Chicago Sun-Times

Set in Detroit in 1949, this dynamic and jazz-infused drama is about what’s at stake when building a better future

midwest premiere

by dominique

morisseau

directed by ron

oj parson davis

Original music cOmpOsed by orbert

Photo by Joe Mazza / Brave Lux Inc.

$20 tiCkets with code trumpet

some restrictions and additional ticket fees may apply

615 W. WELLINGTON AVE IN CHICAGO’S LAKEVIEW EAST

TIMELINETHEATRE.COM 773.281.8463 Paradise Blue is supported in part by The Chicago Community Trust

MAY 31, 2017 ¬ SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY 23