Different Paths

Clare and her boyfriend Chris went exploring the Finger Lakes yesterday while we settled for nothing greater than a lagoon, the one in Humboldt Park to be exact.

Chicago’s park system is a wonder, second only to New York’s, and I’m not too sure about that qualifier.  What comes after Central Park?  If you have to pause, then the Big Apple may be trying to get by on reputation alone.  What comes after Lincoln Park?  Well, you can start with Humboldt Park, let alone Jackson and Washington, one of which will be home to the Obama Presidential Library.  And we don’t even need to consider the Garfield Park Conservatory here (although you might want to go anyhow).

Humboldt is the legacy of Jens Jensen, a Danish immigrant who fell in love with the Midwestern prairie.  As superintendent of the West Parks (don’t ask, it’s a long story), Jensen decided to bring the prairie to this park on the Near Nothwest Side.  Jensen arranged a river, lagoon and trees to invoke a sense of Illinois as it existed before the arrival of us European folk.  On top of that, Jensen happened to be buddies with a number of Prairie architects, so the park is filled with Prairie-designed planters and light fixtures as well as a boathouse, part of which has been converted into a café.  Frank Lloyd Wright didn’t design any of it, but I suspect he would’ve liked eating at the Boathouse Cafe.  I recommend the Monte Cristo sandwich and an umbrella table.  Consider the view of the park as dessert.

Jensen, like Frederick Law Olmsted, wanted city people to find nature in a park; we did that after lunch with a walk around the lagoon, which is bordered with a full array of prairie flowers.  The area used to be Polish, then Puerto Rican, and now it’s gentrifying, like the neighborhoods around the 606 Trail a little further north.  The park long has been a hotbed of baseball, though recently it’s had to yield some space to soccer.  Really, not all change is for the better.