Nature in the City
My favorite Chicago block in Chicago is on 30th and Halsted. What makes this block walkable is that it is in a residential area, and there is not too much auto traffic. There is however, a fair amount of foot traffic. On the North side of the block you can see McGuane Park, the park I played in as a child. McGuane Park itself is bigger than one city block. It has full tennis courts, a playground and a quarry turned walking path.
At the beginning of the path was a big metal structure that was pouring water out of what looked like a bell, it carried the water from the pond on the other side of the hill. I walked up the long steep sidewalk that spiraled around the man-made hill and heard crickets chirping, and cicadas calling to each other. There was a bliss that only nature could bring, despite the fact that I was walking distance from the nearest Orange Line station and the South side of the block was the busier part of Halsted. As I walked up I passed by several old Chinese men who were out for their daily exercise. Walking higher and higher up the hill, you could see a more aerial view of the block. All around the sidewalk were plants native to Illinois. (It said so on a nearby “Did You Know?” post.) The smell in the air from all of the pollen was very sweet, almost like the cereal powder found at the bottom of a cereal bag.
I made my way to the top of the hill and noticed that aside from the flowers growing, the rest of the greenery was turned brown, which surprised me because of the hot weather and spontaneous showers Chicago had experienced in the past three weeks. The top of the hill also had a center circle with boulders designed in a way that people could sit in relax as a group.
As I made my way down the hill I got to a tiny gym that was there for the public. It included pull up bars of different sizes, a piece of equipment used for legs, and a sit up bench. Using the equipment was a young man who stopped and asked me if I could snapchat him working out. Since I knew snapchats are ten seconds, so it wouldn’t take long, I agreed to help him. He had upbeat music playing from a speaker that was on the leg equipment, I assumed for background music. Once he said to start recording, I watched him jump on to the pull up bar and do several gymnastic spins, it was pretty impressive. After our short exchange, I walked West of the block. The West side of the block had a man made pond, I wasn’t quite sure where it ended though. Several people lined up along the now metal sidewalk, casting their poles to catch fish. Those who weren’t there to fish, marveled at the pond on a strip of sidewalk that extended into the pond. I looked North and I saw a miniwaterfall, I could hear the sound of the stream it made. Its stream was connected to the pond and further North it was connected to the bell shape metal structure at the beginning of the trail.
I walked back East to the playground and passed the young man, still practicing his gymnastics, and as I made my way to the playground, I saw an older couple slowly driving by watching him flip on the bars, they too looked impressed. At the playground, I revisited some childhood memories. The woodchips felt coarse but dense from the rain, beside the playground was a seal shaped water sprinkler that was spraying mist from the stone seal’s mouth. The spray felt like a cool breeze, but it soon added to the humidity.
I walked further South to the busier side where there was a plaza of stores.
Closest was a thrift shop named UNIQUE, and furthest South was a Chinese restaurant called Triple Crown. As I walked through the strip, Halloween music blared from UNIQUE and commercials through the music were about the sales going on at the time. Further down the plaza, you could detect several smells. Pizza when I passed Little Caesars, spices and BBQ as I passed Wingstop, grease when I passed by McDonalds. On the sidewalk people loitered, there was one homeless lady outside of Walgreens, I recognized her from about ten years ago, and two other men were talking outside loitering. On the street side, things were more busy. There was more traffic and cars beeped at each other to move out of the parking lot, or correctly drive back on to Halsted or down 30th.
Response to Jacobs
Jacobs writes, “In this dependence on maps as some sort of higher reality, project planners and urban designers assume they can create a promenade simply by mapping one in where they want it, then having it built. But a promenade needs promenaders. People have very concrete reasons for where they walk downtown, and whoever would beguile them had better provide those reasons.” The mistakes planners make is that they assume people will love whatever they plan and build, but this often leads to deserted areas. In Chicago there are better, more safe neighborhoods that are surrounded but “not so great” areas. For example, the Illinois Medical District and University Village are generally busy areas and people tend to feel more safe there because it is busy and there are small businesses. However, right outside of these areas, are the Section 8 housing blocks, which generally don’t make people feel very safe because they aren’t sure what kind of people are living there. Jacobs also writes that surrounding a beautiful planned environment usually surrounds trouble. This is the case in this specific Chicago neighborhood. The city planners probably didn’t assume that having a busy neighborhood would bring trouble, or that people who longed for that environment, couldn’t be in that environment. In other words, they assumed that because they made a nice area that people would want to be there. But, the didn’t take in account all of the land because some of the neighborhood is now used for Section 8 housing where crime rates are typically higher.
