In US, the difference a park makes
DESPITE the bitter wind, Kim Wasserman showed me around La Villita Park. Occupying 85,000 square metres in the middle of this city’s largest Mexican-American neighbourhood, called Little Village, the park used to be a brownfield and illegal dump. Back then, the site leached toxins into hundreds of nearby basements. Sickened residents protested for years. The federal cleanup, finally completed in 2012, became the largest urban Superfund project in the US.
Wasserman, executive director of the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, then helped lobby the city for the park.
She pointed out where residents got the playground, ball fields, skate park and community gardens they wanted. The $19 million park hosts citysponsored sports programs and free concerts. During warm months, Wasserman said, formerly incarcerated young residents from Little Village help keep an eye on La Villita, discouraging gangs from moving in. “The community feels ownership of the place,” she said.
One result in this city known for its murder rate: next to no violent crime in the park, according to Wasserman.
Chicago is at the forefront of a growing, big-city trend. It has been undertaking a major parks and open space program, upgrading neighbourhood play- grounds and recreation centres, scooping up acres of disused land for new green areas and repurposing large swaths of formerly industrial waterfront. Aided by a long-standing tax that goes directly to parks, these efforts to improve public space, begun under the city’s former mayor, Richard M Daley, have gathered steam since Rahm Emanuel took office in 2011.
They have met with some of the usual resistance from state authorities reluctant to finance city improvements and from some aldermen who want money now allocated for parks, trees and after-school programs redirected toward violenceprevention. The mayor has testily noted that after-school programs and parks, like La Villita, provide exactly the sort of safe spaces for young people that help reduce crime.
“Urban policy often focuses too much just on housing,” Emanuel told me “Housing alone doesn’t make a neighbourhood.”
That’s a view shared by Mayor Jim Kenney of Philadelphia, who was swept into office last year on a platform committing hundreds of millions of dollars to fixing up some 400 dilapidated green spaces, ball fields, pools, libraries and recreation centres in underserved districts. Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate among the 10 most-populated US cities.
Hunting Park, in North Philadelphia, is an example. For years, it was a troubled place before its revitalisation started in 2009. Since then, crime has plummeted 89 percent, probably not all thanks to improvements to the park, though Philadelphia authorities attribute declines in prostitution and drug dealing to families taking over the park.
I spent an afternoon with the city’s parks commissioner, Kathryn Ott Lovell, touring crumbling libraries and rec centres in North and West Philadelphia scheduled for makeovers. Once great buildings, still bustling with children, they remain critical to their neighbourhoods, barely held together today by bubble gum and underpaid, overworked custodians who are among the city’s unsung heroes. Changing demographics, new technologies and evolving demands by residents on parks and libraries to be complex community hubs require that these places receive more than just a fresh lick of paint or sod.
They need extensive rethinking. The William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia has pitched in an additional $100 million to help make all that happen, its biggest grant ever.
“We want every Philadelphian to be able to walk to a place that says, ‘You are worth it’,” Lovell explained.
Chicago is trying to send the same message. East of Little Village, in the Bridgeport neighbourhood, Studio Gang, the highly regarded architecture firm, has designed an elegant new zinc-clad public boathouse, with clerestory windows and a jagged roofline, providing a gateway from Bridgeport to the waterfront. Farther north, the 606, Chicago’s version of the High Line, which opened in mid-2015, has turned a defunct rail corridor into a wildly popular pedestrian greenway.
And to the south, near Lake Calumet, in an area of shuttered mills where Chicago approaches wilderness, Big Marsh has lately opened as a public bike park and nature preserve carved from nearly 200 acres. I drove to Big Marsh with Michael P Kelly, chief executive of the Chicago Park District, who envisioned it becoming “a major new attraction” for cyclists, then took me to a housing project called Altgeld Gardens Homes in far southeast Chicago.
There, the city has installed playground equipment and spruced up parts of Altgeld Gardens’s decrepit 1920s-era rec centre, including an indoor swimming pool. At the center, Kelly introduced Brian Bradley, the park district’s supervisor for Altgeld Gardens, a huge, quiet man who, in his spare time, teaches young residents how to box.
“This is a community that fights hard,” Bradley told me. We were standing beside the heated pool, a magnet for older residents and children, with a view onto the playground. “Places like this are where everybody comes together,” he said.