WBEZ | Parks

A tale of two Kellys

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 05:00:00 -0500

Politicians love to get their names on things. So when a politician passes on, it's natural that the living politicians try to find something public they can rename to honor a departed colleague. In Chicago, this process can become quite creative.

Take Kelly High School and Kelly Park. They’re across California Avenue from one another, just south of Archer Avenue. But each is named for a different Kelly.

Thomas Kelly was born in 1843. He got into Democrat politics and was elected alderman in the 28th Ward. He later became a trustee of the Chicago Sanitary District. Kelly was serving on the Board of Education when he died in 1914.

In 1928 a new junior high school opened at 4136 South California Avenue. Thomas Kelly had been on the school board and lived in the neighborhood, so the building was named for him. In 1933 it became a four-year high school, which it remains today.

The school also owned a parcel of vacant land across the street, on the east side of California Avenue. In 1947 the Park District signed a lease for the property with the idea of building a park. A number of adjacent home owners were forced to sell by court order, and their houses leveled. In 1951, Kelly Park was dedicated.

Meanwhile, Edward J. Kelly had just died. This Kelly had been Mayor of Chicago from 1933 to 1947, the longest tenure in the city’s history. Today the signs at the park read “Edward J. Kelly Park, established 1951.” However, it’s not clear when Ed Kelly’s name was actually put on the park.

I had an older friend who grew up nearby. He said the vacant land on the east side of California was informally called “Kelly Park” as early as the 1940s. It was considered to be part of Kelly High School.

Maybe the Ed Kelly dedication did take place in 1951. Maybe it took place in 1991, when the Board of Education transferred its portion of the property to the Park District. Maybe it happened some time in between. The end result is a sort of cut-rate commemoration, two politicians for the price of one.

In any event, Ed Kelly now has his own bit of immortality. And as much as any Chicago politician, he deserves to be remembered. After all, he’s still the longest-serving mayor whose name is not Daley.

Chicago's Hispanic neighborhoods farther from nature, study shows

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 07:30:00 -0600

Moving to the city shouldn’t mean giving up nature. Studies have shown that people who spend more time in natural settings bounce back from stress faster and might even be healthier than those without access to parks and open spaces. In Chicago, however, some communities are closer to nature than others.

According to recent research out of the University of Illinois at Chicago, residents of Chicago’s Hispanic neighborhoods live farther from nature than residents of other neighborhoods.

What is unique about the study, titled “Green infrastructure and bird diversity across an urban socioeconomic gradient,” is that it looked at multiple variables instead of just, say, average distance to greenspace. They measured proximity to open space and Lake Michigan, but also the presence of trees (canopy cover), and bird biodiversity in census tracts across the city.

“When you look at the patterns across all four variables,” said Amélie Davis, a postdoctoral research associate at UIC and lead author of the study, “you can see the low- to mid-income Hispanic tracts are further from Lake Michigan, further from open space, they have lower bird biodiversity, and they have the lowest percent canopy cover.”

That means they are also farther from the benefits those natural elements either indicate or provide directly — ecosystem services, to use the jargon. Canopy cover, for example, is more than aesthetic. Trees help regulate the local air quality, stormwater runoff and even noise pollution.

That socioeconomic disparities influence Chicagoans’ access to nature is not entirely surprising, given the city’s legacy of segregation. What was unexpected, Davis said, was that the statistical analysis found low-income, Hispanic neighborhoods fared significantly worse than low-income, African-American areas.

“We thought if there was an environmental injustice,” she said, “it would be for all of the groups or none. Not the same group consistently underserved.”

As the Tribune’s Blair Kamin pointed out, Chicago’s massive lakeside parks give the impression that the whole city enjoys easy access to open space along the shoreline (which is, after all, “forever open, clear and free”). Inland it is a different story. Little Village, for example, has the least green space per capita of any neighborhood in the city.

But Davis cautioned against assuming any ill-intent on the part of City Hall.

“It might be a concurrence of circumstance, and not pernicious,” she said. Industry squeezed out most of the natural spaces in Pilsen and Little Village before those neighborhoods became an important Hispanic enclave. When their notorious coal-fired power plants shut down last year, however, residents of the southwest side left no doubt about their aspirations for more green space.

And the study does not tell the whole story. Proximity to open space is not a perfect stand-in for access, to say nothing of the quality of that open space.

Davis’ research is funded by an Urban Long Term Research Area Exploratory grant from the National Science Foundation. The study was published in Ecosphere, a journal of the Ecological Society of America.

Follow Chris on Twitter @cementley.

Ill. license fee for state parks goes to governor

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:42:00 -0600

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — The Illinois Senate has approved a $2 license plate fee to improve crumbling state parks.

The plan to cut into a $750 million backlog in park maintenance and repairs now goes to Gov. Pat Quinn. He's indicated he approves of the proposal.

It was the second go for the Senate. The measure failed in June but received a 39-11 vote in favor on Wednesday.

The money would be used by the Department of Natural Resources. It was suggested as an alternative to charging an entrance fee.

A basic annual license plate costs $99.

How do they clean the Bean in Millennium Park?

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 16:24:00 -0500

Curious City is a news-gathering experiment designed to satisfy the public's curiosity. People submit questions, vote for their favorites, and WBEZ reports out the winning questions in real time, on Facebook, Twitter and the timeline above.

This round's winner is Tim Garibay from Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. His question is: "How do they clean the Bean in Millennium Park?" We've got our reporter Maham Khan on the trail and, as always, we'll keep you posted.

P.S. Who is "they" anyway? That's going to be front and center in our investigation.

December 21, 1910: Open, clear, and free

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 13:15:00 -0600

When Chicagoans want to show off the beauty of our town, we take visitors to the lakefront. Most cities don't have such a spectacular front yard. That makes December 21st an important date.

Back in 1836 Chicago was still a village. The commissioners who were building the nearby Illinois & Michigan Canal used their authority to make the lakefront public land. They ruled that it would be "a common to remain forever open, clear, and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever."

The lake came almost up to Michigan Avenue then. The order applied to the area east of the avenue, between Randolph and 12th Street (Roosevelt Road). In 1856 the Illinois Central Railroad built a trestle over the open water to a terminal at Randolph and Michigan.

After the 1871 fire, the city started dumping debris into the space between Michigan Avenue and the railroad trestle. This created a landfill known as Lake Park. Squatters' shacks sprang up, while the garbage mounds kept growing. For a few years the city's National League baseball team played their games on a corner the site.

By 1890 Lake Park was an eyesore. Mail-order tycoon Montgomery Ward had his office directly across from the park. Citing the 1836 decree, he brought suit to have the area cleared and kept open.

Ward's action was not popular. He was standing in the way of progress! Surely an ancient law enacted by a bunch of dead commissioners did not apply to modern conditions, and should be discarded! The case worked its way to the Illinois Supreme Court. The court ruled in Ward's favor.

Over the next twenty years, politicians and their allies tried various ways to evade the law. Ward beat them in two more lawsuits. Meanwhile, the park was renamed Grant Park and spruced up. Except for the Art Institute, there were no new buildings.

In 1910 the trustees of the proposed Field Museum of Natural History wanted to build at Congress Plaza. Ward sued again. On December 21 he was upheld again--finally, and definitively. The museum was later built on new landfill south of 12th Street.

Montgomery Ward died in 1913. Today he's looked on as a visionary, who saved the lakefront for the people of Chicago. So why isn't there a statue of him in Grant Park?

Mural restoration heartens Puerto Ricans

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 12:00:00 -0500

One of the country’s oldest outdoor murals covers a storefront on Chicago’s Northwest Side. People who care about the 40-year-old painting are finishing a facelift. The mural restoration is doing more than brightening up a gritty stretch of North Avenue. It’s got Puerto Ricans in the Humboldt Park neighborhood talking about their heritage.

MITCHELL: A celebration of the restoration included music with roots in Puerto Rican slave plantations. José López of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center recalled the artists who painted the mural in 1971.

LOPEZ: Young Puerto Ricans from the street — people who were marginalized — decided to give us a legacy for our historical memory.

MITCHELL: The mural covers the side of 2423 W. North Ave. and includes portraits of nine Puerto Ricans who struggled for abolition and the island’s independence from Spain and, later, the United States. Three of them are on crosses. Those three all served long U.S. prison terms in the mid-20th century. The artists, led by Mario Galán, named the mural “La Crucifixión de Don Pedro Albizu Campos” after a Puerto Rican Nationalist Party founder. They put him on the biggest cross. López said the mural has special meaning in a part of Chicago where many Puerto Ricans can no longer afford to live.

LOPEZ: Gentrification means, many times, the writing away of people’s history.

MITCHELL: Restoring the mural took a decade. Neighborhood leader Eduardo Arocho attributes that to a developer who owned a vacant lot in front of the work.

AROCHO: His plans were to develop a three-story condo unit. We tried negotiating with him for several months, even at one point offering him several lots in exchange. And he refused and he just started to build the wall, covering the mural intentionally. And so that’s when we grabbed our picket signs and started to protest.

MITCHELL: The city finally won control of the lot and helped turn it into a small park to keep the mural visible.

PITMAN WEBER: It’s remarkable that this mural has survived.

MITCHELL: John Pitman Weber is a professor at Elmhurst College in DuPage County. He has studied and created public art for more than four decades. And he provided consulting for this mural’s restoration, carried out by Humboldt Park artist John Vergara.

PITMAN WEBER: Its content is unique, not only in Chicago but nationally.

MITCHELL: And aesthetics? Pitman Weber calls the mural formal and stark.

PITMAN WEBER: Kind of Byzantine, in a way, quasi-naïve -- executed by some very, very young artists. The style possibly even adds clarity.

MITCHELL: Not all Puerto Ricans appreciate the artwork or the idea of the island breaking from the U.S. But when I ask the ones who walk by, most have strong attachments to the mural.

WOMAN 1: My mom used to go to St. Aloysius. My parents did and so...

MITCHELL: That’s a church right here.

WOMAN 1: It’s a church down the street. I used to go there when I was a little girl. And my mom would drive us to church and that’s how I knew we were getting close is when I’d see the mural almost every Sunday.

MAN 1: I see Don Pedro on the cross being crucified for what he believed in. Crucified the same way as Jesus!

WOMAN 2: I used to get up every morning and look at this mural.

MAN 2: I went to prison. I was 17 years old and I went to prison for 20 years. And, during those 20 years, when I used to think about home and I used to think about Humboldt Park, it was this mural that I used to think about.

MITCHELL: Why is that?

MAN 2: I remember when I was first looking at it, I think I was maybe 9 or 10 when I first noticed it, I didn’t know anything about Puerto Rican history. To me it was just a painting that was up there. I didn’t understand who was up there, what it was about. But when I went to prison I learned about my culture, I learned about who I was. I even got this guy on my arm. Two of these guys are on my arm.

MITCHELL: Tattoos.

MAN 2: Yeah, Pedro Albizu Campos on my right arm and I got Ramón Emeterio Betances on my left arm. And I think I can attribute that to this mural, man.

MITCHELL: The mural restoration will be complete with the addition of calligraphy this fall.

Garfield Park Conservatory still reeling from hail damage

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:26:00 -0500

The Garfield Park Conservatory on Chicago’s West Side is continuing cleanup efforts and unveiling a fundraising campaign Wednesday night following severe hail damage.

The June 30 hailstorm pounded the conservatory and damaged about 40,000 panes of glass.

Eunita Rushing, president of the Garfield Park Conservatory Alliance, said they've cleared glass from the plant beds and ceilings in the Show House and Fern Room. She said they’re nearly done putting in a temporary roof to protect the ferns from the looming cold. Ferns require warm, humid temperatures to survive.

Rushing says visitors Wednesday can see that roof, an open sky in the Show House, and shards of glass still hanging in the production houses.

“They'll see the commitment of the people who work here and care for this collection, that we really are interested in restoring every bit of it, every inch, every greenhouse, every production house and replacing every plant,” she said.

Some sections of the conservatory suffered little damage because they’d been recently renovated with double-pane glass, and they’ve remained open to the public.

But glass in the other sections, including the Fern Room, dated back to the 1940s, and as much as 85 percent of that glass was damaged, said Zvezdana Kubat, a Chicago Park District spokeswoman. Those rooms are still closed.

The conservatory is raising money for repairs with a campaign called One Pane at a Time. Donors can sponsor a pane of glass for $250 and up.

Cleanup costs are about $2 million, and there’s no estimate yet for repair costs, which are expected to go into the millions.

The story of the statue atop La Salle Street

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 12:15:00 -0500

If you're in Lincoln Park this Labor Day, you might pass him on your way to the zoo or North Avenue Beach. Look for him a few hundred feet north of the Chicago History Museum.

There he stands, gazing down the street that carries his name. He is one of Chicago's most visible statues. He is - to give him his full name -Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle.

Much of the material about La Salle is incomplete or contradictory. He seems to have been born of minor French nobility in 1643. As a youth he studied with the Jesuits, and may have thought about becoming a priest. But in 1666 he moved to France's North American outpost at Montreal.

La Salle was ambitious and well-connected. He received a series of royal patents to explore the interior of the continent. The idea was to set up forts and trading posts, and eventually attract settlers from the mother country.

Beginning in 1669, La Salle mounted a series of expeditions. He explored the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, then moved onto the Illinois River and the Mississippi Valley. He probably portaged through the area that became Chicago. But if he did, he didn't think it important enough to mention.

Every so often he returned to France to get his patents renewed, or otherwise engage in court intrigue. He was always on the go, and never found time to get married.

And though La Salle was intelligent and brave, he wasn't always popular. During a 1687 expedition into Texas, his men mutinied and killed him.

La Salle's name has been immortalized in streets and parks and hotels and towns and counties. And as anyone who ever watched All in the Family knows, there was once a La Salle car. ("Gee, our old La Salle ran great . . .")

The La Salle statue is among the city's older monuments. Designed by Jacques de La Laing, it was cast in Belgium, shipped to Chicago and formally dedicated in 1889. The money for the project was provided by art patron Lambert Tree.

Settlement could lead to big park for Mexican neighborhood

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 22:35:00 -0500

The city of Chicago could be near the end of a five-year legal battle for control of a former industrial site with potential to help form a 24-acre park. If an eminent-domain settlement holds up, the land could be an asset for a Mexican-American area of the Southwest Side.

Cook County Circuit Court Judge Sanjay T. Tailor this week signed off on the deal, under which the city will pay more than $7.5 million for about 19 acres owned by 2600 Sacramento Corp.

“I don’t get a penny,” company owner Joanne Urso said Friday afternoon. The money will go to the Cook County Treasurer’s Office and remain there as Urso tries to settle with a bank that has filed suit to foreclose on the property, according to her attorney.

Urso’s land could combine with an adjacent five acres the city already controls. The park would total about five blocks, all just west of South Sacramento Avenue and north of West 31st Street. The perimeter would pass residential buildings, industrial properties and the Cook County Jail.

Activists in the Little Village neighborhood hailed the settlement. “We have not seen any park development in over 75 years,” said Kim Wasserman, executive director of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization.

Wasserman said the deal could inspire other neighborhoods to push for public amenities and services. “Regardless of language and regardless of immigration status, as long as there is determination in these communities, we can continue to get the things that we need,” she said.

The park concept has the backing of the local alderman. “That’s what we’re pushing for,” said Juan Manzano, an aide to Ald. George Cárdenas, 12th Ward.

The property served industrial manufacturers for more than 70 years, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Their output included asphalt, coal tar and driveway sealer. Celotex Corp. made roofing products on the site from 1967 to 1982, the EPA says.

Allied Chemical and Dye Corp. purchased that operation. A series of mergers and acquisitions turned Allied into New Jersey-based Honeywell International Inc. The corporation dismantled the Celotex facilities between 1991 and 1993, according to the EPA. Urso’s company bought the property later.

After cancer-linked chemicals turned up in nearby homes and yards, the EPA designated the area a Superfund site. A Honeywell cleanup consisted largely of covering the land with gravel. The cleanup finished last year, the agency says in a statement.

Chicago filed the eminent-domain suit in 2006. The case became more complicated in August 2010, when Texas-based United Central Bank filed the foreclosure suit, a nearly $10 million claim, in federal court. The loan involves both the Celotex site and another Urso property.

The city’s payment for Urso's land will consist of $6 million from the Chicago Park District and more than $1.5 million from city general-obligation bonds, according to Jennifer Hoyle, a spokeswoman for Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

But the timeframe for creating the park is not clear. Ownership of Urso’s property will transfer to Chicago upon payment, due September 7, but the city is not specifying a date for turning over the acreage to the Park District. “Possibly later this year,” Hoyle wrote Friday afternoon.

A possible obstacle is a Chicago Fire Department facility on the adjacent five acres.

The biggest challenge could be funding the park construction. Wasserman’s group is calling for playgrounds, a farm, sports fields, an amphitheater and a community center. Building all those amenities could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the group says.

Why a Balbo?

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 12:15:00 -0500

In 1933 Chicago staged a World’s Fair in Burnham Park. July 15 marked one of the Fair’s highlights. Shortly after 6 p.m., the Balbo Air Squadron arrived in the waters of Lake Michigan.

Aviation was still exciting and dangerous in 1933 — only six years had passed since Lindbergh’s trans-Atlantic flight. Now General Italo Balbo, head of the Italian Air Force, had brought his fleet of 24 seaplanes on a goodwill trip from Rome to Chicago. Because of bad weather and an accident along the way, the journey had taken two weeks.

But now they were here, safely moored off Navy Pier. A few minutes after the landing, Balbo himself strolled onto the deck of his seaplane, coolly surveying the cheering thousands who had gathered on shore—he looked as if he were “going to afternoon tea,” one reporter wrote. The General lit a cigarette and smiled.

For the next three days, the city went Balbo-crazy. The General and his fliers were feted with a rally in Soldier Field, speeches, parades, banquets, and proclamations. Seventh Street was renamed Balbo Drive. The hoopla was so outrageous the Marx Brothers spoofed it in their movie A Night at the Opera. Then, at the end of the three days, the intrepid crew flew back to Rome.

That’s the way it looked in 1933. But as Paul Harvey used to say, now for the rest of the story . . .

The Italian government that sponsored the Balbo Air Squadron was the Fascist government of Benito Mussolini. Balbo himself was a true believer, often referred to as the Duce’s “right-hand man.” The brutality of the Fascist regime was already well-known.

Still, many apologists accepted such “difficulties” as the price of progress. One bit of wisdom declared: “Mussolini may be bad, but he makes the trains run on time.”

So Chicago took Balbo to its heart. And on the first anniversary of the flight, the city accepted an ancient temple column as a gift from the Italian government. The Balbo Column was erected in the park east of Soldier Field.

General Italo Balbo was killed in 1940, his plane hit by friendly fire. There was suspicion that Mussolini ordered an assassination to remove a popular rival.

Today in Chicago, Balbo Drive remains. From time to time, there’s talk that the name should be changed. The simplest solution would be to make it “Balboa Drive,” after the old Spanish explorer. That’s what most Chicagoans call it anyway.

The Balbo Column also remains. Its florid inscription mentions Mussolini and “the Fascist Era.” Unfortunately, the words are carved into the stone base. If they’d used a copper plate like most other monuments, it would have been stolen by now, and we wouldn’t have to be embarrassed by the sentiment.

The area where the column stands is now known as Gold Star Families Memorial Park, in honor of police officers who have been killed in the line of duty. Why not put a new plaque on the column and re-dedicate it to them? Sometimes historical revisionism does make sense.