The week before
last, my wife took off her birthday, which is what each of us should do when
that special day rolls around. And you
could do a lot worse than what we did, driving down to the South Side in order
to explore Jackson Park.
The park was conceived
back in 1871 by Frederick Law Olmsted and his partner Calvert Vaux; doing
Central Park in New York proved to be good for getting design jobs elsewhere. Chicago being Chicago, the plans weren’t
followed in their entirety, but the results are stunning, nonetheless. Why else would Barack Obama want to put his
presidential library there?
Michele and I
drove through the park to scout out the library site along with the golf course
that some people want to upgrade so it can hold PGA tournaments. The present course, though not designed by
Olmsted and Vaux, dates to 1899 and is pretty popular. The same goes for the adjacent nine-hole
course at the South Shore Cultural Center, fronting Lake Michigan.
How did two
competing courses come to be built? The
one at South Shore was private, part of a country club; Jackson Park was more
for duffers. Now, golfers get their
pick, and, if they’re black or Jewish, they can play South Shore, something that
wasn’t allowed when the country club operated it; the Chicago Park District
acquired the property some time ago. If
I were ever to learn how to golf, it would be at Jackson Park or South Shore.
We parked the
car outside the cultural center and walked around. There was a golf class being conducted for
inner-city kids on the putting green not far from a small beach that used to be
off-limits to everyone but the lucky few.
Behind the beach is a nature center, all trees and prairie plants. I dare you to take a path, go halfway in and
get any sense you’re in the city of Chicago.
This must’ve been what Father Marquette and the Potawatomi saw.
The Jackson
Park-PGA advocates want Tiger Woods to design a new, combined course; a tunnel
is supposed to connect the two courses.
(Gosh, I wonder who’ll pay for it?)
If that happens, I doubt anybody will care what Olmsted said long ago
about parks offering “a sense of enlarged freedom” to city dwellers.
After all, what
did Olmsted know about birdies and eagles or greens fees?
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