3 ACRES ON THE LAKE: DuSable Park Proposal Project

NARRATIVE DIGRESSIONS

MOTIVATION

This project began with a personal fascination with the site, which I passed every day for years on my bike on the way to work. The land caught my attention because it rose as a hill from under the bridge -- most of Chicago is flat -- and the meadow reflected seasonal changes and, over the years, ecological succession that sharply contrasted with the frozen perfection of highly maintained public parks. The apparent wildness of this spot -- and its inaccessibility -- in the midst of prime downtown real estate suggested a nest of contradictions and possibility.

The conceptualization and development of the project is rooted in my work as an artist focusing on collaborative situation-specific projects and public art. The development of a project often involves researching a place in all its particularities, including social histories and physical attributes, in order to conceive an idea that engages and makes visible aspects of "place," as well as resonates with personal interests and desires. When doing this work collaboratively, and/or in public space, "personal" interests and desires often become collective, externalized, public, and lead to questions about representation (who speaks for whom), what this "speaking for" looks like, and how it might conflict with, or supersede, other visions. Similar questions surround the potential uses of DuSable Park.

I thought about this meadow's odd abandonment in the midst of downtown for at least seven years. Every time I rode past, I thought to, but didn't, swerve off-course, and the continual act of riding over this untested possibility became a grooved denial, a pleasure-in-reserve. The pleasure wasn't about going there, but about there being somewhere to go; a pleasure delayed and therefore preserved, intact and unpunctured. I grew up among hills, and with a meadow in back of our house that we didn't own but that I regularly trespassed on. My nostalgic fantasy is to roll down that meadow-hill in Chicago in late summer under a hot sun, disappearing in the tall grasses, and letting bugs crawl onto my face among hay smells and water sounds; but to do so in solitude, undetectable, grasshopper-like, alone. This fantasy is in direct conflict with the idea of public land. Public access and all that goes with it -- safety, maintenance, functional design, and universal access -- would destroy exactly what attracted me to the meadow: its isolation, neglect, and opportunistic possibilities. How do we reconcile public use with private desires?

ENCLOSURE

Last summer, I rode downtown to City Hall to find out who owned title to the land. In order to find a title, you need an exact street address. The meadow has no address. The Recorder of Deeds sent me to the 8th floor, to "maps." Because of the city´s residential housing boom -- while low-income and affordable rental units evaporate -- the lobby was frenzied with contractors, architects, and developers wielding calculators and plans, thick rolled blueprints leaning against walls and rolling across the floor under the feet of civil servants playing ping pong. The maps department, down a long hallway to the left, was strangely empty -- a large open space arrayed with about twenty desks piled in papers. Finally a guy arrived from a door somewhere in the back. He seemed exasperated. He told me the person I needed to talk to was Barbara, and he pointed to an empty chair. Barbara never materialized. Eventually the clerk got me a map. The meadow was represented as a blank spot -- no signs, numbers, names, nothing, unlike all the other properties around it. The clerk smiled for the first time. He said this is unusual, it appears that no one owns that land. It must be landfill. He chuckled.

On the way home from City Hall, I rode inland to North Water Street, where Riverview Towers had recently risen from piles of sand. I intended to bike through the new construction onto the park. It was noon. The workers had spilled out from the building and collected around the lunch trucks, and all one hundred of them, on break with nothing better to do, turned and looked at me. Instinctively, I braked and reversed.

photo credit: Chih-Hsuan Lee

The bridge operator´s office, which controls the raising and lowering of Lake Shore Drive to accomodate tall ships, is a small concrete room on top of the highway. This is accessed at the level of the bike trail, by an enclosed concrete stairway going up. Another concrete stairway mirrors this one, going down, to the meadow, but that one is padlocked. That noon when I returned to the biketrail I watched a worker enter the iron gate by just pulling it open. He turned and gave me a sharp look as he closed it behind him, feigning a click by knocking his steel-toed boot against the metal. I waited a few minutes, then locked my bike to the railing, and followed him down. The interior of the stairway was voraciously graffiti-ed: the word "JUGS", and lots of spiral forms; two guys sat on the bottom steps smoking dope.

The meadow grass was much higher than I thought -- about eight feet. It wasn't familiar, a flowering stalk with perpendicular branches, tiny white flowers on all its radiating tips. Sweet-smelling but impenetrable. When I tried to walk into it, its multiple branchings tied slip knots around my legs and arms. After only a few steps I could no longer move forward, but was held in a kind of suspension. I imagined all those condo eyes looking down on me stuck in a thicket. All I could do was back up and de-knot. Someone else had stamped down a sort of path. It didn't lead up the slope where I wanted to go, but quickly down to the rocky bank of the lake, and to a pile of empty beer cans. I found a flattened area, and stood around for a while, not wanting to sit down in what felt more like a trap than a refuge. When I finally removed myself from the branching grass, and climbed back up the concrete stairs, the dope-smokers were gone and the gate had been padlocked from the outside, locking me in.

The creation of "enclosures" starting in England around the 14th century marked a significant step towards the institution of private property. Land that had been open to public use was enclosed within fences, ditches, or hedges for the private use of landlords, for recreation or capital accumulation (agriculture, grazing). Tenants were expelled, and had nowhere to make a home, nor means of feeding themselves, resulting in "hardship, increased vagrancy, and social unrest." If caught trespassing or poaching, they were unreasonably punished (imprisoned, often put to death).

photo credit: Chih-Hsuan Lee

Locked inside the meadow, I felt less like a poacher and more complicit with the private interests responsible for installing locks and gates. After all, I had wanted the meadow to myself -- for fantasy purposes, but none-the-less as a kind of private property. Getting what you want is often disappointing and sometimes claustrophobic. The outside becomes the inside; there is no longer a somewhere else. As it turned out, none of the workers paid any attention at all when I walked under the highway and out through the chainlink fences.

PARK

(parc fr. enclosure)
an enclosed piece of ground stocked with game and held by royal prescription or grant:
a tract of land that often includes lawns, wood, and pasture attached to a country house and used as a game preserve and for recreation;
a piece of ground in or near a city or town kept for ornament and recreation;an area maintained in its natural state as a public property;
an open space, esp. a grassland that is all or partly surrounded by woodland and is suitable for cultivation or grazing
(parc fr. enclosure)
to bring to a stop and keep standing at the edge of a public way

Last summer (August 2000) a public meeting was held to discuss the future of DuSable Park. Though plans to build a park have been in the works since the Washington administration dedicated it to DuSable in the late 80s, the Park District claims it doesn't have sufficient funds to go ahead. Priorities for funding, says CPD, are parks in areas of the city that have no green at all, and the downtown lakefront has plenty. As an intervening measure, and to generate funds for construction, CPD revealed their plans in July 2000 to lease the land to a private developer who would pave it over as a temporary parking lot.

The park vs. parking lot debate drew energetic resistance from downtown residents, many of whom were involved in the Grant Park Advisory Council. GPAC joined with other groups including Friends of DuSable Park, the DuSable League, and the Sierra Club to hold the Chicago Park District responsible to the 1972 protection ordinance. The Park District claimed it could get special dispensation for a lot if it was "temporary." But the downtown locals wielded lots of clout. The parking lot plan was put on indefinite hold, as of September. One intermediate proposal was to "level the mound on DuSable and sod the flattened land so that we would be looking down at natural grassland..." ("looking down on"? "natural"?)

"The park district could charge $100 /day to park vehicles from nearby construction sites there -- 40 vehicles, $4,000/day." (quote from August 2000 community meeting)

PRIVATE PROPERTY

This week, someone was evicted two doors down from my building. At noon on a Monday, I returned home to get a phone number and a police car was parked facing the wrong way on our one-way street. Two big men were carrying the last pieces of furniture onto the sidewalk. The rest of a life already sat out there -- stacks of LPs, loose clothes, plates, shampoo, rugs, pots, curtains, a broom, framed pictures, belts and neck ties, a geranium, lamps, quilts, a mattress, winter coats, high-heeled shoes, photographs, waste baskets, magazines, more furniture -- a rocking chair, drawers spilling underwear, a glass-topped coffee table. A group of men had gathered across the street, watching. We agreed that something should be done to notify the tenant. The landlord who was standing on the steps overseeing the removal said the tenants were not to be found. A police officer came out carrying a small white very well-cared-for dog that he put in the backseat of the squad car. By two o'clock, five or six people were tentatively circling around the stuff; by four there was a frenzied crowd of twenty or thirty moving quickly, and another crowd watching them, and by dark nothing was left of that household but a lone sock, some broken chair legs, and a scattering of glittery aluminum staples.

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