After years of jogging through Lincoln Park, Erma Tranter knew that the city’s parks had problems. But she didn’t know how many problems until Friends of the Park, of which she is executive director, completed an exhaustive study of 40 different parks. To do so, the group chose three parks from each of the city’s 13 districts–one small, one medium, and one large–visited them, and recorded their impressions.
“I don’t want to criticize Madison, because from what I see in the newspapers he’s on his way out,” says Tranter. “I do think he was better than his predecessor [Ed Kelly]. But Madison’s administration was bogged down so much by crisis management: they always seemed to be putting out fires. Simple things–like seeing to it that the grass in Lincoln Park was mowed on time–got by them all too often. I don’t think he came close to ever really getting the job done.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Sometimes the discrepancies reflected the attitudes of Park District supervisors. Parks in black wards, for instance, had more basketball courts but fewer ice-skating rinks, tennis courts, and baseball diamonds than those in white wards. Apparently the Park District supervisors had concluded that blacks were born with a preference for basketball.
Look, for example, at Portage Park, on the northwest side. Tranter, Nelson, and Ryder discovered a well-kept park without a trace of litter and boasting a pool, tennis courts, and baseball diamonds. At Davis Square Park, a black area on the southwest side, they discovered broken benches, broken glass, graffiti, and baseball fields so choked with weeds they were “unusable,” according to their report.
Maybe so, but no Park District employee–even Ed Kelly–ever made anyone disfigure a park bench, drop trash on the grass, smash bottles in the tot lots, or dump tires, cars, shopping carts–you name it–in the lagoons. Why the inability to drop trash in any one of the dozens of receptacles in almost every city park? What force of nature compels someone to drop a bottle on the ground rather than walk 100 feet or so to a garbage can? Go to almost any park in the suburbs, and you won’t see a fraction of the debris found in just about any Chicago park on any given day.
But decentralization may not prove a complete enough overhaul of the bureaucracy. Tranter says, “Some park supervisors have told us they can’t make basic repairs because they can’t cut through the bureaucracy and get tradespeople to come to the park. Well, either there are not enough tradespeople, or the ones we have are not doing their Job. In Lincoln Park they have some water mains that haven’t been fixed for months because the supervisors can’t get the plumbers out there. That’s ridiculous.
