Let’s talk about neighborhoods that don’t have enough parks
Take a trip from Lincoln Park to Brighton Park
There are several neighborhoods in Chicago that are thirsty for park space. Wouldn’t it be great if the energy for more publicly-owned park space in Lincoln Park and Bucktown could be shared across Chicago?
Proponents of new park space along the Chicago River between North Ave. and Cortland St. are trying to close a gap where new park space is least needed — even considering that 7,000 people may move in over the next decade or two.
Jake Peters is Chicago born and raised, a architect & urban designer who studied urban design, transportation, and housing issues at McGill University the University of Cincinnati.
Sterling Bay, a local property developer, has proposed a project called Lincoln Yards, that would redevelop land left vacant by the former Finkl steel factory. The company has proposed nine residential buildings that would have approximately 6,000 apartments and condos.
Part of the proposal is a series of small parks and publicly-accessible plaza and plaza-like spaces. Two parks south and north of the river, each about 6.2 acres. Combined they equal roughly the size of Kilbourn Park in the Irving Park community area.
The questions about parks during the Lincoln Yards public meetings, and the ensuing media coverage, have been about whether the proposed park is large enough.
Park size is a common way that park projects are discussed, including with the Obama Presidential Center (OPC) where lost acreage is a point of contention. We talk about park deserts in a way that seems to revolve around every park having to be as large as possible in order to quench a thirst for park space that is often measured in acres per resident.
How we talk about access to parks too often revolves around park space per person, which treats it as a commodity to be supplied and consumed, rather than how accessible of an amenity it is to each person.
The arguments about the acreage of Sterling Bay’s park proposal in comparision to the North Branch Park & Nature Preserve are not very appropriate given how they have been used to make a case that Lincoln Park is starved for recreation space. Which might seem to be true to neighbors, but is not true when compared to the many other community areas that have fewer parks, lower proximity to parks, and fewer of the neighborhood amenities or economic opportunities that Lincoln Park has.
Research from the National Recreation and Park Association shows that living near parks, and the kinds of facilities offered at nearby parks, are more important than amount of park space when it comes to equitable distribution of park resources (equity in this case means making improvements to park access that right historical wrongs that have disproportionately affected disadvantaged or underresourced communities).
Park advocates used to think in terms of number of acres per 1,000 residents, but that is starting to change into measuring access in terms of maximum distance to a park and certain types of facilities. For example, living within a half mile of three playlots provides fewer recreational opportunities than being within a half mile of a trail, a playground, and a ball field.
In terms of proximity, the Lincoln Park and Bucktown neighborhoods surrounding the Lincoln Yards site are completely covered by at least one park within a half mile of every residential area (shaded in green). These parks include both active (pools, playgrounds, fieldhouses, courts, playing fields, trails, and dog parks) and passive (gardens, lawns, tree groves, wetlands, overlooks, etc.). The only areas without good park proximity are the resident-free areas between the river and the highway.
The location of the parks proposed by Sterling Bay only moderately improves proximity, even after the recently announced plan eliminated 2.5 acres of plazas in order to consolidate park space. This is because the parks are located at the center of their proposed development, but they greatly would improve the variety of amenities that are within a half mile of nearby residents.
The proposed North Branch Park & Nature Preserve, on the outside of the Lincoln Yards property, that is being pushed by community groups would do an even better job at reducing these gaps, but that is mainly because it relies on using General Iron’s property that extends all the way south to North Avenue. Where the existing pedestrian bridge on Cherry Avenue — which crosses the river from North Avenue to Goose Island — and a new one proposed by Sterling Bay, would combine to extend access to the park much further south.
If a goal is to eliminate all of the gaps in proximity that exist along the North Branch Corridor, then it will take more than one riverfront park.
It would make sense for a comprehensive riverfront park plan to include a park on the land that the city acquired along the river next to the new alignment of Elston at Fullerton, as well as one in tandem with the bridge that R2, another property developer active in the Goose Island area, has proposed along the old Ogden Avenue right-of-way on the south side of Goose Island. To address issues of park access in any part of town it will require comprehensive planning that thinks beyond the boundaries of a given developer’s properties, which will need to be led by city and Park District planners, not by private entities.
Comprehensive planning for new parks should be viewed with an even wider lens to look at park access up and down the city. The Friends of the Parks released a report this month that concluded that, on the North Side, the city and Park District only needs to maintain park proximity as new residential projects are built.
Elsewhere, improving facilities and programming on the South and West Sides — where private community groups aren’t able to raise millions of dollars for upgraded facilities — should be prioritized.
Perhaps the new riverfront park be provided primarily as passive park space because even in the Park District’s response to the Friends of the Parks report they highlight that new parks like La Villita in Little Village were built to address an inequity in programmed park space. It seems that adding more in a wealthy part of the city would only further widen this gap.
It is true that North Side parks can be congested due to high demand from users willing to pay for the use of park space in the form of league dues, but that shows that there are opportunities to privately fund new facilities to meet these demands.
In some ways the relocated Chicago Park District headquarters and new park at Western Avenue and 48th Street is a great example of where new amenities are actually needed. That project will offer fewer than 16 acres of park space compared with the 24 acres of contiguous park space that was proposed by community groups for the North Branch Reserve Park, but it will have programming that can engage with headquarters’ onsite staff experts in a way that no other park in the city has.
Even here though, the project doesn’t actually increase the amount of neighborhoods in this part of town that are within a half mile of a park, and it occupies a prime site for housing adjacent to the CTA Orange Line Western Station.
We’re having a worthy discussion about inequity in Transit-Oriented Development locations, yet aren’t using an ideal TOD site on the Southwest Side for affordable or public housing. Similar to the combination library+senior housing developments, we could build a combination Park District headquarters +fieldhouse + transit-adjacent family housing development fronting on Western (on the site of the proposed parking lot), while maintaining a 15-acre park in the area west of Artesian Avenue.
This type of combined park+affordable housing project is currently being proposed for the former Magid glove factory at the end of the 606.
Colocating multiple uses would have numerous benefits and could be done in partnership with the Back of the Yards Development Corporation which built the El Zocalo Apartments, a six-story project nearby on 47th Street.
The CPD HQ+park adds much-needed facilities. Residents in the southeast corner of Brighton Park would be closer to sports fields than they had been before, but all of these areas were already within a half mile of a park, including Oakley Park that’s two blocks away but doesn’t have a fieldhouse for its field.
Furthermore, the eastern side of Brighton Park is not very far away from McKinley and Gage Parks, which are both larger than the proposed park. The CPD HQ+park project is a great addition in the neighborhood, but the park component will not increase proximity for the people who live in portions of Brighton Park that are furthest from an existing neighborhood park.
To fully address where the distance from a park is the greatest in the community, three new pocket parks could be built focusing on different facilities that are lacking as well as increasing park proximity:
- A new park and plaza with a stage could fill in the empty lot near Sacramento/Archer that disrupts an otherwise vibrant stretch of restaurants and stores. This could be acquired by the city in exchange for a city-owned lot at Troy/44th, and could serve as an anchor for the commercial corridor & a site for neighborhood festivals.
- According to the City Owned Land Inventory Map, the city owns the property on which strip mall sits on Kedzie south of 47th. A new field could be built on the western half of that site along with a new affordable housing development fronting on Kedzie, one block away from the Orange Line station. Which would add another Orange Line adjacent TOD, along with closing the largest portion of the gap in park proximity south of Archer.
- Since there are no city-owned properties, or large vacant lots in the area bounded by Christiana, Drake, Archer, and 43rd, it would be a good use of public funds to acquire one or two lots in this area and build a small new park or playlot so that families have a facility that doesn’t require walking nearly a mile.
All three proposals — Lincoln Yards’ on-site parks, the North Branch Reserve Park & the Park District HQ — share the idea that new park acres are a net positive, even though none of them will be located in such a way to best address park access holistically in either part of town.
There have been successes in improving equity in park space, facilities & programming in recent years (i.e. Big Marsh, Gately Park Indoor Track & Field Facility, proposed Englewood Trail, and lakefront access improvements on the South Side). Even the 606 addressed a missing amenity on a portion of the West Side (although displacement issues have lessened its impact in terms of equity).
Yet there are still places across this city that need better park facilities. Those areas will only fall further behind if the only new parks are huge signature projects that make headlines and are driven by the availability of one site. Chicago has the ability with the Neighborhood Opportunity Fund (NOF) and existing TIF districts to right these wrongs in connected ways rather than one-off projects. That requires more robust planning ahead rather than reacting to proposals presented by individual stakeholders.
