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Fall
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Controlled burn
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Raking in wild seed
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Water lily
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Chicago's Park Revival
By David Cohen
Chicago parks are undergoing a renaissance,
and the Chicago Park District is hard at work identifying
and restoring its natural areas. This recovery is visible
nearly everywhere in the city. Equally significant —
and much less heralded — is the growth of volunteer
stewardship in the parks. The range of people intent on
restoring greenery in the city includes serious citizen
scientists, school children and their teachers, retired
folk, and political organizers newly focused on parks. This
renewal of public commitment is flourishing with the wetlands,
prairies, and bird sanctuaries. It reflects a signal change
in urban conservation.
"We're just at the beginning stages
of our stewardship plan, and people are hungry to volunteer,"
says Mary Van Haaften, natural areas manager at the Chicago
Park District and someone who has helped stimulate the
change. "The key is finding interested people who live
around the parks and offering to share the responsibility
to care for these places."
Funds set aside for development are
already strained, and Van Haaften and her colleagues see
volunteers as crucial to success. Indeed, they intend to
nourish a small citizen cadre that can organize a larger
group as circumstances demand, a core circle living in proximity
to the 50 natural areas undergoing revitalization.
The volunteer program complements two
recent initiatives promoted by the Park District's newly
created Department of Natural Resources. The first is an
extensive rehabilitation of the district's 16 lagoons, for
which it expects to spend $35 million. This work was scheduled
to be carried out between 1998 and 2008, but pressure on
Illinois' budget may push the deadline back. Nevertheless,
landscape architects are busily recasting the original plans
of Jens Jensen and Frederick Law Olmsted, stabilizing water
levels in the lagoons while making them more accessible
to the disabled, and improving biodiversity.
The second initiative focuses on natural
areas management. The Park District started it in 2000 to
ensure that the newly restored lagoons, as well as the district's
prairies, wetlands, and woodlands, will be properly monitored
and managed over time. The ongoing work, at a cost of $2.5
million a year, includes water quality improvement, erosion
control, vegetative surveys, controlled burns, litter collection
from lagoons, brush control, and the reduction of invasive
species.
Most projects begin with cleanup. "It
was important to focus initially on trash removal in order
to create a good first impression of the nature areas,"
said Andrew Clauson of ARAMARK ServiceMaster. The facilities
management company began work in the spring of 2001 and
has played a major role in redeveloping the parks. An enormous
amount has been extracted from the lagoons in particular,
including toss-away litter, shopping carts, bowling balls,
bicycles, and even a safe that was taken out of the water
at Jackson Park.
Gompers Park is a good example of the
work the Park District is doing and the help it's getting
from area neighbors. The park is bisected by Foster Avenue,
just west of Pulaski. The North
Mayfair Improvement Association, a community group active
since the 1920s, has made regenerating the park a priority.
The Gompers Park Lagoon was built in
the 1930s, next to the regional headquarters of the Salvation
Army, and was badly in need of repair by the late 1990s.
As Jim Macdonald, an activist with the Mayfair group, points
out, the "lagoon" is fed by city water and ultimately
leads to the wetland just to the north. The Park District
drained and reexcavated the lagoon two years ago. It had
silted up over the years, resulting in shallow water that
froze completely to the bottom and killed the lagoon's inhabitants.
Erosion along the banks was damaging water quality and the
range of aquatic life.
In addition to the excavation, the Park
District put in rushes, sedges, and native wetland grasses
to check the erosion, as well as stabilization netting on
the lagoon floor. Some of the 200-year-old oaks near the
lagoon have seeded others, and the Park District has added
dogwood and crabapple.
Build it and they will come
— both nature and people.
Photo by Mary Van Haaften.
A retired anthropology professor from
Northeastern University, Macdonald is avid for nature. His
enthusiasm for the Park District's work has been spurred
by regeneration of the adjacent prairie and wetland. A flood
plain for the North Branch of the Chicago River, the two-acre
parcel is now being extended southward. "Before,"
Macdonald notes, "this was just a wet meadow the Park
District tried to mow — unsuccessfully." The campaign
for rehabilitation started in 1995, when the wetland was
reexcavated, and moved into high gear a year ago. The ARAMARK
team has conducted controlled burns, which check invasive
plants and encourage a healthy grassland ecosystem, and
they plan to reconstruct pipes to more effectively regulate
the water flow between the lagoon and the river.
"We've been seeding this area with
native species," Macdonald adds, referring to the drier
ground fringing the wetland. "The northern oriole and
song sparrows are recolonizing the area. They've come back
with the new plantings." As it has at Jackson Park
Lagoon and Montrose Point, the Park District has also erected
a large multi-nest birdhouse for purple martins, swallow-like
birds that nest in colonies.
Most often, Macdonald and a solid core
of about 25 volunteers collect litter and try to ward off
invaders, chiefly garlic mustard. Additionally, they collaborate
with Friends of the
Chicago River and TreeKeepers.
"We also have frog monitors with the EcoWatch
program," says Macdonald. "Frogs are a measure
of environmental health, and I've noticed a decline in the
12 years that I've lived here.
"The community simply felt we needed
more nature," Macdonald says. "We still think
the Park District lacks adequate funding and staff to maintain
the area. Mary Van Haaften is a ball of fire, but you can't
have 50 projects going with a thin bench. Here at Mayfair
we have a deep bench. You need people to go out in the community
and develop a program that unites it. The city needs to
build a network at a very local level."
Photo by Mary Van Haaften.
The recently renamed Bill
Jarvis Migratory Bird Sanctuary, at Addison Street right
on the lakefront, is one of the best-known birding sites
in Chicago. Renewal there was inspired by birders Jim Landing
and Terry Schilling, and Lakeview reformer Charlotte Newfeld.
The treasured bird habitat in the sanctuary
was deteriorating, so in 1996, Newfeld and other concerned
neighbors took action. "As parks chair of the Lake
View Citizens' Council (LVCC)," says Newfeld, "I
decided it was time to get something organized. We started
at the grassroots level and called a meeting of birder organizations
and anyone else who was interested."
There was plenty to do. The cement footings
for the fence surrounding the seven-acre sanctuary were
breaking up. The water level inside the preserve had ebbed
because the Park District cut off the supply every autumn
when the fountains were turned off. Invasive plants proliferated.
The volunteers started work by weeding
out the invasives and collecting trash — one curiosity
was a mailbag filled with documents from the 1930s.
At first, "the Park District would
open the gates but never leave me the key," says Newfeld.
The group persisted, though. With the guidance of Schilling
and others, they were soon removing green ash and buckthorn,
replacing these invasive species with a wide array of native
seeds and plugs, including the downy rattlesnake plantain,
an orchid. Eventually, the nearly 80 native plant and tree
species in the sanctuary were more than doubled.
The volunteers got more ambitious by
1999. The LVCC developed a mailing list, and word spread
on Internet chat lines. Ultimately, the group obtained a
$25,000 state grant, which they devoted to outreach, refreshment,
tools, and plant materials. They also hired a tree management
firm to protect quality trees in and near the sanctuary.
The volunteer base expanded with the
variety of species. By the summer of this year, 300 people
had signed on, including two entomologists from the Field
Museum who conducted a limited survey of the insect
population. The volunteers persisted with the work that
could be done by hand. Enticed in part by the energy of
the volunteers, the Park District took on the heavy lifting.
With an initial budget of $350,000, they replaced the cement
path, reestablished and extended the fence, stabilized pond
edges, and erected a viewing platform. The water supply
is also now kept relatively constant.
A second major birding site is Wooded
Island and the Jackson Park Lagoon south of the Museum of
Science and Industry. "It's a stunning asset,"
remarks activist and volunteer coordinator Ross Petersen,
who likens it to a natural oak savanna. This North Side
resident was raised in Hyde Park and remains active with
the Jackson Park Advisory Council, the neighborhood group
the Park District consults on the project.
The chief expense of the project was
rebuilding the control station that regulates the water
flowing from Lake Michigan to the 59th Street Boat Harbor,
the Columbia Basin, and the lagoon. The new facility should
stabilize water levels in the lagoon and the basin even
as they fluctuate in the harbor and the lake. "The
goal," says Elizabeth Koreman, a project manager at
the Park District, "is to restore the ecological balance
in the lagoon. Fluctuating water levels have caused erosion
and reduced water quality."
The banks of Wooded Island were relatively
stable. Those of the basin and of the five tiny islets in
the lagoon were not. Dirty water obscured sunlight. The
darkness limited oxygenation, which was dangerous for the
fish. "Everything," laments Koreman, "got
out of whack."
Along the basin shoreline, invasive
tree species deprived the underlying shrubs and plants of
light, preventing them from developing dense root matting,
a defect that accelerated erosion. Now, volunteers have
curtailed the invasives and replaced them with prairie,
woodland, and wetland species that will make for a sustainable
park ecosystem.
But Petersen sees big challenges in
the city's multi-million-dollar effort to rebuild the area.
Can the Park District reconcile the nonnative plantings
of early city planners with today's focus on healthy ecosystems?
Will it maintain its natural areas after the expensive revitalizations?
And can it bring all of its projects to the level that some
have reached?
Perhaps volunteers will fill their most
important role in providing the guidance, focus, feedback,
and sustained personal interest critical to addressing these
questions. Indeed, Petersen thinks it's essential to "fold
an ever-increasing public interest into the mix."
Frank Clements, a principal in Wolff
Clements and Associates, one of the companies the Park District
has hired, cites two incentives that keep people involved.
One is social contact with like-minded park lovers, and
the other is an opportunity to study the natural world.
Evidence is building that people are finding both.
For a free nature brochure, call
(312) 742-PLAY. For information on stewardship workdays,
please visit the Chicago Park District's "Volunteers@CPD"
section.
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