Hampton Avery Architects

Make No Old Plans

I realize I am coming very late to this, but I was finally able to figure out what has been bugging me about the Friends of the Park plan “The Last Four Miles”. If you are not familiar, it is worth taking a look at the plan, here, before reading further.

To say that the disconnected parcels of park and beach at the north and south ends of the city should be tied together with more parkland is like saying oxygen is a good thing for humans. It is absolutely true and it should have been a part of the park systems capital plans and budget long ago. But, to butcher a phrase, if you want to stir people’s blood, you have to do something other than finish someone else’s old ideas.

There was an opportunity with this plan to rethink the relationship between the city, the lakefront and its parks, and propose solutions that grow out of the nature and needs of the city today. What we got was more of what we already have and know well. Instead of looking forward, the authors of the plan looked backward, and chose to continue a plan that was revolutionary in the late 1800’s. With all of the progress that has been made and the ideas developed about public space in the ensuing 100+ years, I think we could have done better.

This lack of forward thinking is especially disappointing because the extreme ends of the lakefront offer so much rich fodder for ideas and design. In Edgewater and Rogers Park, and South Shore, there is an intimacy between the city and lake shore that cannot be experienced anywhere else. The city comes right up to lake, without an eight lane highway to separate them. Buildings, beaches, parks are inseparably intertwined, each influencing the other in interesting and unexpected ways.

For example, in Edgewater to access Osterman Beach you must first pass through a slot of space between two high-rises. The energy level in this slot can be quite high since it is the northern terminus of the lake front bike path and there are always people passing through. That energy builds anticipation which is fulfilled when you emerge from that narrow space and find yourself on a crescent of sand and water stretching into the distance. It is Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous ‘compress and release’ entry sequence on an urban scale.

An experience like that gives us so much to build on. How great would it be if that intermingled nature of lake, park, and city could move farther inland? What if the east west streets could become linear parks/streets that create a clear connection between the neighborhoods and the lake? They could serve to direct and connect bikes and pedestrians to the lake. With careful manipulations of landscaping and proscriptions on future building form, a rich spatial journey could be created; a journey that culminates in that beautiful line where sand meets water.

At the same time those parks/streets would bring new public spaces deep into the park-starved neighborhoods. Imagine a series of new and existing parks and spaces connected by a coherent path that accommodates pedestrians, bikes, and cars in equal measure. It could be an updated version of the boulevard system on a smaller and more intimate scale.

One of the most beautiful things about the 1909 plan was that it looked forward, as well as backward. Burnham and Bennett studied cities and regions around the world and applied the lessons they learned to their plan. They also developed very specific and radical proposals that were particularly suited to Chicago.

If a similar line of thought had guided this effort then perhaps we would be seeing more spirited discussion of the plan. Instead, the only debate it seems to have sparked is a heated and at times uncivil one about whether or not the plan is a Trojan horse extension of Lake Shore Drive. If the authors of the plan had treated their assignment as an opportunity to explore the role parks and open space should play in the city and what form they should take, maybe the response would have been something other than “Goody! More parks! Now what was I doing?”