Some Chicagoans are eager to help Chicago 2016 plan for the Olympic bid, but Washington Park has few representatives at community meetings
Close to 60 Chicagoans debated the merits of plans for Washington Park in Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid Saturday morning at the third Washington Park Olympic Venue Legacy meeting.
Despite the high turnout from residents of Hyde Park, Kenwood and a few North Side communities, Cecilia Butler, president of the Washington Park Advisory Council, was concerned that most of the attendees were not from Washington Park proper—the neighborhood just west of the park that expects to see substantial re-developments should Chicago win the bid.
“As a community resident and an active member of my park, I am somewhat disturbed…We have a lot of people in this room talking about this park who don’t live here.” Butler said in her opening remarks to the group. “Think about that, how would you like it if some people came to your community and talked on your behalf? Make sure you are an active user of this park before you feel like making decisions about it.”
Butler said in an interview that she estimates Washington Park residents accounted for no more than one quarter to one third of the meeting’s members, who came to discuss plans for temporary and permanent changes to the park and recommend planning improvements to the Chicago 2016 committee.
“I’m not so concerned about the Olympics in the park. No. I’m concerned for that community west of the park that will be really affected; the people who use this park and drive through it… the people who live on Cottage Grove,” she said. “Where are they?”
But Arnold Randall, Chicago 2016’s director of neighborhood outreach, who led the meeting, held at the Washington Park Refectory, 55th and King Drive, insisted that every opinion counted—not just residents of Washington Park.
“I think it’s important to stress that a lot of the people who come to these meetings use the park every day,” he said. “[Chicago 2016] thinks it’s important to hear what everybody has to say about it …from a community perspective.”
Butler said that Chicago 2016 has so far addressed most of the issues identified by her Council, which issued a “26-Point Plan” for how it thinks the Games should be operated. But the WPAC is still waiting for the committee to clarify what will happen to the local cricket and soccer teams who play in the park, and how soon park roads would be closed to through traffic after construction begins. WPAC supports the bid, Butler said, but only if Chicago 2016 meets all of their demands, which include, “Building trade contracts and On-the-Job training programs for the African-American community,” and a stipulation that re-located local sports teams be able to have their user fees at other recreational sites eliminated or reduced.
During the meeting, Randall emphasized the importance of community support for Chicago 2016’s plans, which include building a collapsible stadium and an aquatic center with four Olympic-sized pools, but did not distinguish between attendees from inside and outside Washington Park. According to Randall, the purpose of the meeting’s presentation and break-out sessions was foremost to gain input from residents about what structures should ideally remain in the park after the Games, and where they should go.
The possibilities include relocating three of the four swimming pools to other park districts while leaving the fourth in Washington Park for public use and to complement the already-existing Dyett community pool, he said; Chicago 2016 is also considering leaving behind a down-sized version of the Olympic stadium with 25 to 35 hundred seats to be used for festivals and public gatherings.
Randall and spokespeople for the Chicago Park District distributed worksheets to the collection of nearly one-dozen breakout session groups, and asked them to describe how they envision the Aquatic Center and stadium's legacies in the Park after the Games. Chicago 2016 officials later collected and recorded the groups’ recommendations into a power-point presentation.
Jonathan Fine, executive director of Preservation Chicago, a North Side-based advocacy group, lead his breakout session group. “We reject the proposal to build an Olympic stadium in Washington Park, and recommend that Chicago 2016 find an alternative venue,” Fine read from his sheet. Other members of the group, all hailing from Hyde Park, North Kenwood or Bronzeville, debated whether or not that message was too strong.
But Kublai Toure, who sat at a neighboring table, was less conflicted. “As a black man who has lived in this community for over 50 years, I’m very concerned about my people being displaced,” he said. “There’s a lot of elderly people still in the community who have fixed incomes, and [the economic changes the Olympics might bring] create a problem for them. We have no confidence in this city government whatsoever.”
Toure, who lives just north of the park on Grand Boulevard and acts as executive director of the neighborhood advocacy group Amer-I-Can Illinois, said he did not come to the planning meeting expecting to sway Chicago 2016 in any direction. “I think it’s a done deal—I didn’t get anything out of the meeting. I just wanted to let them know that there’s a lot of people who feel like I do.”
Madiem Kawa, another Washington Park resident, speculated that poor advertising might be responsible for the low attendance of local community members. Despite subscribing to the email list-host of her district’s alderman, Willie Cochran, Kawa did not learn about the planning meeting until she attended an un-related community meeting in Jackson Park.
Kawa is the volunteer stewardess of Washington Park’s nature areas, and leads volunteer programs in the park for the Chicago Park District. “They hold this meeting on one of my [volunteer group’s] regular work days,” she said. “We can’t normally attend the meetings unless they change the date or time.”
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