The two and a half acres of land sit within a triangle formed by the intersection of three streets — Jonquil Terrace and Haskins and Hermitage avenues — just south of where Rogers Park meets the Calvary Cemetery in Evanston.
The Haskins-Hermitage triangle contained more than its share of troublesome buildings, causing the city to designate it and some surrounding land an urban renewal area in 1976. In time, the buildings were razed, and then came the issue of what to put on the land next.
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Since so much of the area’s housing stock was in horrible shape, some neighborhood activists came up with the idea of constructing new low-income units on the triangle. In 1980, Peoples Housing Inc., a development offshoot of Good News Church, joined clout-heavy builder Thomas Rosenberg to propose building 164 units of subsidized town houses and apartments for families and the elderly.
And there was the triangle. By now it boasted a rusting tot lot that the Park District had installed, and a section of it had become a public garden, where Laotians, Mexicans, whites, and blacks — the rich ethnic mix that composes North of Howard — worked side by side raising vegetables each summer.
In the fall of 1984, Art Traczyk, a city of Chicago landscape architect, ran some neighborhood meetings where residents were shown a mock map of the park and asked to rearrange little pieces meant to symbolize various features. Should the teeter-totter go here? What about the baseball diamond? Ultimately, however, most of the active characteristics of the park were scotched because including them would have jacked up insurance costs to prohibitively high levels.
“In New York, our park department doesn’t have the money anymore to act responsively to community needs,” says Tom Fox, the Open Space Coalition’s executive director. “In the 30s and 40s the parks here had 40,000 employees. Now there are 4,200, to maintain 26,000 acres. As a result, the parks suffer, and particularly the small ones closest to home. But with neighborhoods developing their own parks, we have a new model, one that combines local initiative and government activity.”
“What has to happen now is for the people in this neighborhood to say, OK, this park is ours, and we are going to make it what we want it to be. There must be pride. But if people take ownership of the park, it will be a wonderful place. That may be idealistic. The other question, of course, is what would the triangle be if we hadn’t have claimed it? just a piece of unused land sitting there, and isn’t that worse?”
