For most of its existence, the Illinois Medical District has been a massive — and not entirely friendly-looking — campus of large institutional buildings, crisscrossed by wide, greenless streets.
Functional, yes. But the 560-acre Near West Side district, which is home to a host of entities ranging from John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital and Rush University Medical Center to the FBI headquarters, too often felt big, cold and disconnected from the surrounding city.
But the district has been improving over the last decade or so with more green space and retail buildings. There’s even talk about the district working with the city and state to narrow the overly-wide commercial streets that crisscross the campus.
Another promising move was last month’s ceremonial groundbreaking of a state-funded $5.9 million one-acre public park to be built in the center of the district.
The park would occupy a triangle of land bounded by Ogden Avenue, Polk Street and Damen Avenue.
The project’s officials and architects said the park would act as a place of activity and rest, despite its busy locale. And it will be the site of the previously announced permanent memorial to COVID-19 victims and workers — one of the nation’s first.
“If you were here visiting your grandparents and you wanted to go for a walk and digest that information you have just been given, or if you were a physician who had just delivered terrible news and didn’t want to be in the hospital environment for a minute, where would you go?” Illinois Medical District CEO Allyson Hansen said.
“With the park, we’re really giving our community options on where they can go, reflect and regain themselves.”
Once built, the district will have its first new park since green space was created on the north side of Harrison Street across from the now-former Cook County Hospital to make room for a monument to Louis Pasteur in 1946.
‘Safe and comfortable space’
The project’s lead designer, Hana Ishikawa, partner at the Chicago landscape architecture firm Site Design Group, said the park has been designed using the World Health Organization’s three overlapping principles — mental, physical and social health — in mind.
The mental health area of the park would feature a four season garden of colorful perennials, shrubs and trees.
“It has very textural plants that you can feel, smell and touch with a healing garden in the center of it,” Ishikawa said. “It’ll be a special node that will be a serene gathering area.”
Brenda Kiesgen, senior project manager at Site Design Group, said the mental health portion of the park will have musical chimes.
“We are focused on the sensory,” she said.
The social health area will feature seating, and it’s where the COVID-19 memorial is planned. The physical health activities would take place on a large lawn and a fitness track will loop around the property.
If the park is successful, it will act as a foil against the surrounding of noise of traffic and blaring ambulance sirens — just as regular city parks and green spaces provide a momentary getaway from the city.
“The complexity was really trying to create a safe and comfortable space when you’re surrounded by Ogden and Damen, which are really heavily traveled roads,” Kiesgen said. “So really trying to create those soft barriers that create a sense of welcoming and safety and security within that site.”
Construction on the park will begin March 2026, and it’s expected to be completed in March 2027.
Hansen said the park is another step in the agency’s master plan to improve the nation’s oldest medical district — a 24-hour community with housing, medical research facilities, labs, a biotech business incubator and more — and better connect it to the burgeoning Fulton Market and United Center nearby.
“When I worked down here in the Illinois Medical District a decade ago, this was not something I ever thought was possible,” she said. “We had a hard time putting an Au Bon Pain in the bottom of our ambulatory building at that time”