For years Laurie Palmer rode her bicycle to the School of the Art Institute, passing along the way a vacant, overgrown meadow on the lakefront just south of Navy Pier. Last summer she finally stopped to inspect it up close. Bordered by Ogden Slip to the north, Lake Michigan to the east, the Chicago River to the south, and Lake Shore Drive to the west, the three and a half acres of fenced-in landfill were covered with trees, thistles, bladder campion, Shasta daisies, Queen Anne’s lace, and other wildflowers.
The park was never built, and the Park District had decided to pave it over as a temporary parking lot (the gravel area just east of North Water Street was already being used for parking by MCL construction workers). After two years the money raised from parking fees was to fund the park’s completion. Palmer couldn’t see it happening. “You lay down asphalt and build berms and deposit antifreeze and gas for X number of years, and you have the idea that you’re going to someday take it away and return it to a park? Nobody believed it would be temporary.”
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Bob O’Neill, president of the Grant Park Advisory Council, recalls that in July 2000 he received “an anonymous voice mail from another city agency that I’d better look into it–that they were trying to build a parking lot. Right away I started convening meetings.” The council weighed in on the issue, as did Friends of the Parks, Friends of the Chicago River, Friends of DuSable Park, the Streeterville Organization of Active Residents, the Haitian Physicians of America, and the Chicago DuSable League, which has been lobbying for a monument to honor the city’s founder since 1928. The meetings spawned the DuSable Park Coalition, which pointed out to the Park District that the 1972 Lakefront Protection Ordinance prohibits commercial development east of Lake Shore Drive. The Park District claimed it could get a dispensation if the lot were temporary, but in September 2000 the plan was put on hold.
In the late 1800s the CDCT dug Ogden Slip as a waterway between the lake and the railroads at North Pier, in the process creating the 3.5-acre plot. In 1964 the trust sold it to a home developer, but it was saved by the Lakefront Protection Act eight years later and eventually reverted back to the trust, which hung on to it until the mid-80s. Until fall 2000 the park was off-limits to the public. “Once the coalition started meeting with the Park District, there was a lot more attention put on the park,” says Palmer. “They realized it was public land and that they had to open the gates.”
Most of the 65 proposals on display are from Chicago, but some have come from as far away as India, Germany, and Australia. They range from the straightforward to the fanciful, from digital models by professional architects to handwritten letters on yellow legal pads, from watercolor drawings to three-dimensional models, from handmade books to large-scale installation projects (including a monument to the DuSable League). The gallery space is dominated by 12-foot letters spelling out the words “High Rise Land Fill.” The letters are made out of garbage that’s meant to be from MCL’s nearby developments: newspapers in blue bags, bottle caps, Styrofoam containers, cardboard, clothes.
“We’re at the point where the Park District and the Art Institute have to make a decision about when to go public,” says Donald Young of the Puryear design. “They’re speaking with the DuSable League. It’s got to be handled diplomatically. The project has been killed so many times, there’s a real chance for it to go ahead now.”
Something was wrong. Last winter the EPA did some initial testing of the park site with a gamma survey meter and found radioactive thorium in the soil. According to the EPA, the likely source of the radioactive material is the old Lindsay Light Chemical Company, which was located at 161 E. Grand. In the 1920s and ’30s the company extracted thorium-232 from monazite ore to be used in its incandescent gas mantles. After 1933 the company moved to West Chicago, which also has contaminated sites, and in 1958 it was bought by American Potash & Chemical Corporation, which became part of Kerr-McGee Corporation nine years later. Since real estate development prompted testing in 1993, three Lindsay Light sites in the area (including one in adjacent River East) have proved to be contaminated; they’re Superfund sites, though they do not appear on the EPA’s national priorities list.
