Hands Off

A city’s great parks are special, places where people can go to exercise and/or dream.  I was lucky enough to have parents who took me to many of the big parks that serve Chicago.  A threat to a place like Jackson Park is a threat both to my past and every Chicagoan’s birthright.

The nearly 552-acre park borders Lake Michigan to the east.  In the time before air conditioning, my parents would drive to the lakefront, and we’d walk along the shoreline; for a six-year old, scaling the breakwater was like tackling Mt. Everest.  Other times, my dad would just drive through the park, and we’d gawk at all the boats in the harbor.  Families used—and use—the park to picnic—and kids to play sports on a field, diamond or court.  Like I said, great parks are special, and this one was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, who brought his A-game to the project. 

That’s why I’m not wild about the Obama Foundation wanting “only” nineteen acres of Jackson Park for the Obama Center; depending on the outcome of a federal lawsuit, the land will be used to construct an oversized version of the obelisk from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  No thanks.  But I understand if residents around the park see the center as a vehicle for desperately-needed economic development.  That said, I’d prefer that the land didn’t go to the foundation.

And I really, really don’t want Tiger Woods to drop in the way he has for the PGA tour now at Medinah to say how much he wants to develop the Jackson Park golf course into something worthy of a major PGA tournament.  Nope, golf courses don’t make for broad-based economic development.  If they did, Donald Trump wouldn’t have bothered building so many of them.

All a “super” course would do is take two golf courses—the other one being the adjacent South Shore course—and turn them into a facility for the well-heeled.  Right now, both courses are affordable and open to the public.  Make two into one at the cost pegged somewhere between $30-$60 million, and then what?  Duffers will need a loan to play the new course.

Leave Jackson Park be, folks.  It doesn’t need an obelisk and the PGA to do what it has always done best.