Chances are you’ve never heard of Sherman Park. It’s a relatively small (60 acres, or about a dozen square blocks) south-side park that hasn’t had all the maintenance it could use. But even if you pass it every day on your commute down Garfield Boulevard (its southeast corner is 5500 south and 1200 west) you might not have seen it, as it’s hidden from the street by a grassy berm. And if you did drive into the park, through the entrance off Racine, say, you might notice that it’s seen better days.
“It’s not beautiful” now, admits Park District acting assistant superintendent for research and planning Edward Uhlir. “When we get done with the restoration, it will be a transformation that the community will be overwhelmed by.” Continuing an initiative begun by former commissioner Walter Netsch, the Park District has succeeded in getting Sherman Park listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is now targeting over $3 million from various sources to renovate and restore the buildings and grounds.
The city, however, was not forbidden to grow. Nearly 300,000 people lived in Chicago when the three park commissions and the associated boulevard system were born; 30 years later the population was pushing two million, and only one more park had been added.
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What the other 626,000 south-siders–most foreign-born and new to city life of any kind–might be doing instead weighed heavily on the minds of the city’s elite and upper middle class. Drinking and brawling in saloons? Gambling in stuffy alleyways? Listening–God forbid–to anarchist or socialist labor oganizers? Their children hitching rides on streetcars, fishing for rats through the wooden sidewalks, running in gangs, and taunting policemen? Probably all that and more. In Hull-House Maps and Papers, Agnes Holland described “the filthy and rotten tenements, the dingy courts and tumble-down sheds, the foul stables and dilapidated outhouses, the broken sewer-pipes, the piles of garbage fairly alive with diseased odors . . . the numbers of children filling every nook, working and playing in every room, eating and sleeping in every window-sill, pouring in and out of every door, and seeming literally to pave every scrap of ‘yard.’” The availability of parks elsewhere wasn’t making a lot of difference, she implied; the new crowded neighborhoods needed parks and playgrounds of their own.
To be saved? Well, yes, of course a good park system could save the children. It was the springtime of liberalism, when Henry Foreman could assert confidently, “The new parks will be the best preventive of crime that possibly could be found. Environment is everything in the development of a child.”
The ideas of parks and playgrounds were imported, but Chicago invented the field house–half settlement house, half gymnasium. “Parks had long since had refectories, boathouses, and other buildings geared toward specific uses,” write Tippens and CPD preservation planning supervisor Julia Sniderman. “However, Foster’s vision required a building which would combine educational and social purposes with those of indoor athletics. . . . The new building type generally included a branch of the public library, a lunch room, club rooms, and assembly rooms. In addition, it enabled active recreation to take place in the parks even during Chicago’s bitter winters.”
