But LaBarbera, a Hyde Park resident, knows that his neighborhood haunt will be transformed over the next decade if Chicago wins its bid for the 2016 Olympics. Washington Park contains one of the cities largest arboretums and is host to many species of birds and insects that stand to be effected should the city move forward with plans to put the Olympic Stadium and aquatic center in the Park’s north end.
“I am very much in favor of the Olympics,” LaBarbera said. But he is also worried about how the construction projects and influx of hundreds of people will impact the park’s nature areas and fauna.
“I don’t know how to reconcile those two things,” he added.
LaBarbera, a biology professor at the nearby University of Chicago, sometimes brings students from his class on invertebrate zoology to the Park to study water from the lagoons. The lagoons are host to several varieties of native-Midwestern birds, including Caspian terns, great blue herons and white-crowned herons.
An autumn meadowhaw perches on a twig in Washington Park (Photo by Michael LaBarbera)
“The lagoons are artificial, and those are surrounded by some areas that [the Chicago Park Service] planted with native plants,” he said. “They’re not unique plants, but given that we’ve plowed onto the prairie, they’re not exactly common either these days.” Though Washington Park was designed in 1871 to host the Columbian Exhibition and is not a natural park, “it’s the closest to a wild piece of land we’ve got in Hyde Park.”
Preservationists worry that Washington Park, one of urban planner Fredrick Law Olmsted’s most significant design projects after New York City’s Central Park, will have its National Landmark status revoked if Olympic proposals do not conform to the Park’s historic design plans. Some preservationist organizations and members of local sports teams have also probed Chicago 2016 officials in recent community forums on how many years the park may be closed to traffic during construction.
According to LaBarbera, the wildlife should not be affected by Olympics construction much more than it currently is during the summer months, when the park plays host to several festivals and a Fourth of July celebration.
“The whole park is completely packed with people, and more smell of barbecue lighter than you can imagine,” he said. “And you do see an impact on the wildlife. The birds go away for a couple of days. But then they come back.”
"It's very hard to construct a venue without devastating the area around it, and if you later disassemble the venues then there’s nothing but field around you," according to architect Martin Felsen, who spoke at an open meeting about the legacy of the Burnham Plan on Tuesday.
Felsen, co-founder of the urban design firm UrbanLab and professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, has been working with the Chicago 2016 committee on creating ecologically-forward plans. "We've looked at how communities can use the parks more, since [parklands] are not in such great condition some times, and then asked how people can engage open space more." To him, the Olympics could be an opportunity to promote physical health and community spirit, while exploring "green" urban planning initiatives.
Madiem Kawa echoes LaBarbera’s ambivalence. Kawa is a resident of Washington Park, the neighborhood on the park’s western border, and volunteers as the park’s nature area stewardess, organizing community clean-up events and tending to the park’s butterfly and dragonfly habitats. “I’m not opposed to the Olympics,"she says, but Kawa still has reservations.
“I don’t know what kinds of construction [Chicago 2016] will ultimately have in the Park, but I am concerned. If our tree population is taken away, for example, that would impact the number of bird habitats we have,” she said.
The Washington Park Arboretum, which Kawa describes as a ‘living tree museum,’ contains Lindens, Hickories and Bur Oaks, some of which have been alive since before the 1893 Columbian Exhibition. The arboretum is located in the park’s northwest end, close to the proposed Olympic Aquatic Center.
Like LaBarbera, Kawa can also list the species of birds she has seen in the park with ease: ducks, cardinals, finches, warblers, and one great white egret.
Kawa helps organize free bird-watching tours of the park and classes on plant-identification. “How can we educate the public and the Olympic committee to make sure [the nature areas] are not effected? That’s what I’m concerned about.”
Chicago 2016 has not responded to interview requests.
A green heron grabs lunch in Washington Park (Photo by Michael LaBarbera)
“If Chicago 2016 controls access to the park, I think they could actually preserve that wild area quite well,” LaBarbera said of the arboretum. “If they allow people to roam, it won’t be protected. But if they’re smart, they could actually take advantage of the peace and the tranquility of that area.”
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