“But now that it’s getting attention from some famous people,” he said, like a person who has just looked in the mirror for the first time in years, “The neighborhood is remembering it’s attractive again.” The famous people Johnson is talking about are members of the International Olympics Committee, and they may vote in October to place the 2016 Games in the park.
Washington Park is a small, urban community on Chicago South Side; it neighbors the University of Chicago and encircles one of the city’s largest greenscapes, a park designed by urban planning legend Fredrick Law Olmsted. But the area is also caught in a century-long economic decline that has left its 13,000 residents with some of the highest crime rates in the nation and median household incomes approaching $15,000 a year.
Nonetheless, with its 372 acres of park land and 20 minute train ride from the Loop, it’s little surprise to community leaders like Johnson, executive director of the Washington Park Consortium, that the blighted neighborhood has attracted international attention as the proposed site of the 2016 Olympic stadium in Chicago’s bid.
“When you’re in a depressed socioeconomic state, it clouds your perspective on where you actually are in life,” Johnson explained, “and I think the attention of the Olympics is again allowing Washington Park to see itself as a Chicago neighborhood with mainstream potential.”
Man fishes in a Washington Park lagoon on a Tuesday afternoon (6/23)
A Neighborhood in Flux
Johnson has seen the community change first-hand; he grew up at 55th and Cottage Grove just steps away from where the Olympic Stadium would be built, and now he is tasked with executing the Washington Park Quality of Life Plan, a proposal on how community members want to see their home develop over the next decade. The plan was created in a partnership between 20th Ward Alderman Willie Cochran, the non-profit community development organization LISC, and a steering committee of neighborhood volunteers that began brainstorming in the late 1990s, according to Johnson.
But Alderman Cochran thinks the prospect of the Olympics is exactly the inspiration Washington Park needs to turn the plan, which addresses senior issues, urban agriculture and schools, from a blueprint into reality.
Viewing the arrival of the Olympics and the Quality of Life Plan as the cornerstones of community revitalization, Cochran said at the plan’s unveiling in May, “Washington Park will be one of the best, most sought after, thriving locations this city has to offer.”
Besides improving schools and after-school programming for neighborhood youth, the plan is heavily focused on bringing businesses to Washington Park’s main thoroughfares, such as Garfield Blvd., State St., and 63rd St., and planting community vegetable gardens in empty lots on 56th and Indiana and elsewhere.
Johnson, whom Cochran appointed to lead the community revitalization efforts, is “for the Olympics.” But Washington Park has a history of adversity to overcome before it can play an active role in planning for the Games, he says.
“As long as Washington Park is viewed as a desolate ghetto, then [people will say] that any development is warranted, even necessary, whether or not the community has input. Until the neighborhood is perceived as self-sufficient and independent, the impulse will be to interact with us through kinds of missionary behaviors, you know, ‘save the natives kinds of stuff.’”
Johnson’s worries about how Chicago’s Olympics committee might transform the neighborhood are not unfounded. Past redevelopment initiatives from the United Center built west of the Loop to the White Sox stadium in Armor Square have raised housing prices in many of Chicago's low-income areas, displacing some residents and drawing criticism for “gentrifying” their surroundings.
Survival Mode
“People here are generally in survival mode, so 2016 seems like a long way away.” Facing high unemployment rates, high crimes rates, and a recession with no end in sight, Johnson said Washington Park has a great potential to be taken advantage of should the city begin development of Olympian proportions in the park soon.
Johnson’s advice to Chicago’s Olympics committee is to look to Washington Park’s history of hosting sports events and the World’s Fair—a source of pride for a neighborhood that has come to be defined by its historic parklands—and view the park’s neighbors as community partners, not low-income residents to be dispensed of.
Now that Washington Park has a clear set of collective goals, Johnson said he would like to see a freer flow of information between Chicago 2016 and residents on the Olympic bid—rather than the organization's current emphasis on attracting the IOC's attention.
“I’m not impressed by their community outreach or their community vision so far,” he said, leaning back in his desk chair inside Alderman Cochran’s office on 63rd and Cottage Grove.
Does Johnson foresee Chicago 2016 heightening its community outreach after the city has secured the bid?
“Yeah, I think so. I hope so.”
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