About seven months ago the Park District quietly slapped a fee on lap swimming at the city’s indoor pools. Officials figured that since it was essentially a tax on yuppies–who else swims laps?–they would pay it without much complaining.
Over the years he and his roommate, Sam Marts, became regular morning swimmers at Eckhart Park, at 1330 W. Chicago–funky digs, to say the least. There are burned-out lightbulbs in the locker rooms, broken lockers, lousy water pressure in the shower, and icy water in the pool. The two men shared the pool with swimmers from a local high school as well as some disabled locals who had their own coach and routine. They shared the showers with homeless men who wandered in.
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But Sistler didn’t complain, not much anyway. “I figured it was free–it’s for the public,” he says. “The homeless guys certainly have a right to use it. So does the team. I do think the lightbulb situation was absurd. I could go on and on about the lightbulbs. It’s absolutely insane. The classic joke is, ‘How many Park District employees does it take to fix a lightbulb? It must take a lot.’ I’d tell the staff, ‘The lightbulbs are out in the locker room.’ And they’d tell me, ‘We put in a work order.’ I don’t understand the need for a work order. But they said they had to have union electricians come in to change the lightbulbs–the regular staffers just can’t do it by themselves. So weeks would go by before a lightbulb got replaced.”
The fee, he realized, represented a retreat from the old-fashioned principle of a neighborhood park as universally open and free. Under Mayor Daley, he learned, Park District officials have been encouraged to think of the parks as moneymakers, or at least as places that partially pay for themselves through user fees. “It’s all so arbitrary and undemocratic,” says Sistler. “There are no public meetings. They didn’t come to Eckhart and say, ‘We’re thinking of imposing a fee for swimming laps.’” He thinks the decision puts the Park District on a slippery slope. “Today it’s a fee for swimming laps. What’s next? A fee for open swim? Once they get used to fees it’s hard not to use more.”
At a Park District board meeting in April swimmers who showed up to protest were told by officials that they had no reason to complain. Most suburbs charge their residents a fee to use the pools. Why should Chicago be different? Rising costs had made the days of free service impossible, and the alternative was to raise taxes. Park District spokesman Angelynne Amores adds that the district is going out of its way to limit the amount of swimming fees. “The swimming lap fee is for three seasons–in the summer lap swimming is free,” she says. “These lap fees are not a big revenue-generation source, but we recognize that there are expenses for lap swimming. Sometimes the pools don’t open until nine, but you’ll have lap swimmers wanting to swim as early as five. You have to have two lifeguards there earlier than usual. So the fees are really recouping costs.”
Fine and Moran call it a trigger system. If such an alarm had been in place last year–“and it’s unbelievable that it’s not,” says Fine–then maybe the planning department wouldn’t have allowed the building department to issue a demolition permit for the old Mercantile Exchange, the 17-story limestone edifice at the corner of Franklin and Washington designed by Alfred Alschuler (“Big and Beautiful,” August 30). At the very least, the city might have had to hold a public meeting on the matter before issuing the permit.
Also demolished over the summer were the National Bank of Commerce, an eight-story limestone building at 4008 W. Madison designed by the firm of Daniel Burnham’s sons, and one of the original Schlitz taverns, at 11444 S. Front Avenue in Pullman. “The Schlitz tavern is just one of a handful that are left,” says Fine. “These are just three of the prominent buildings that have been destroyed while we were waiting for action. I don’t know how many others have also been destroyed. We only found out about them after they were destroyed. The city certainly didn’t tell us that demolition permits had been sought. That inattention is only going to lead to more demolition of valuable buildings.”
