Grant Park, Chicago’s 300-acre front yard, is in need of a boost.
The historic downtown green space hasn’t seen a large-scale improvement since Maggie Daley Park opened in 2015 — a decade ago, already.
Millennium Park? That was 21 years ago.
But suppose DuSable Lake Shore Drive could be sunken and capped-over to improve pedestrian access between Buckingham Fountain and the lake? Or adding green space — and reducing car-dominance — by shaving off some of the girth of the east/west streets that run through the park?
All of this and more is part of the Chicago Park District’s Grant Park Framework Plan that’s now taking shape.
The plan is a list of big ideas to guide Grant Park’s development over the next 20 years and the funding the park district will seek to pay for it.
It’s a process worth watching. If done the right way, the exercise is a reminder that Grant Park is an asset on face value alone — and one that must be cared for and regularly improved.
Chicago Park District CEO and General Superintendent Carlos Ramirez-Rosa said Grant Park is where Chicagoans “come together for arts, culture, major music events, and it’s where Chicago wants to come together for protests. And it’s so important that that space continues to be a showplace for the city.”
A plan for the next 20 years
The last Grant Park Framework Plan was approved in 2002. The recommendations included a call for major improvements at Daley Bicentennial Park, which ultimately resulted in Maggie Daley Park.
A proposal for a landform amphitheater at Butler Field never materialized, though.
Architect Maria Pellot of UrbanWorks, the firm that led the park plan’s team of design consultants, said public meetings and discussions with park officials, residents, stakeholders and consultants created the latest plan.
“How do we provide opportunities for nature to be more prevalent and to take care of things like the heat and the cold and sustainability?” she said. “So it’s a broad thinking plan.”
The plan seeks basic necessities for the park such as increasing the number of restrooms and food concessions.
Big dreams include building green space over the sunken Metra Electric and South Shore lines — similar to what Millennium Park does now — between Monroe Street and Roosevelt Road.
The new space above the tracks would have separate sections devoted to reflecting pools, gardens, a playground and an Art Institute of Chicago courtyard that would fill the unsightly gap behind the museum’s main building.
Also under the framework plan, the Petrillo Music Shell, 235 S. Columbus Dr., would bow out in favor of more park land.
Admittedly, the 47-year old venue is ugly as sin and its acoustics are wonky. But maybe the structure should be renovated and repurposed for outdoor local productions that deserve to be downtown, but can’t fill the Jay Pritzker Pavilion?
The plan also calls for narrower east-west streets running through the park.
Columbus Drive would receive more greenery, perhaps a trolley or bus to better get people to the museum campus. It could also become a flexible street that can be closed off to vehicles for special events, Pellot said.
“It means being able to close it on occasion and allow for there to be pedestrians having priority on those days,” she said. “Allowing areas for vendors having food trucks — all sorts of things you can imagine activating Columbus in the middle of the park.”
Pushing Lake Shore Drive underground and capping it over with both parkland and a direct pedestrian connection to Queen’s Landing is the plan’s most compelling and expensive proposal.
It’s been a long-held dream. For instance, back in 2001, architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava and the Chicago firm Epstein developed plans at the same crossing for twin cable-stayed pedestrian bridges. Then-Mayor Richard M. Daley rejected the plan, fearing it would be too expensive and block views of the lake from Buckingham Fountain.
Putting the expressway in a tunnel won’t be cheap either.
“All of these things are very, very expensive,” Grant Park Advisory Council President Leslie Recht said.
Recht said she isn’t a fan of the plan’s proposal to close off Ida B. Wells Drive at Michigan Avenue and use the reclaimed roadway to reunify the plaza at Congress Drive, where the bronze statues The Bowman and The Spearman stand.
The plaza was once a pretty grand Beaux Arts civic space, but it was chopped up and partly demolished in the 1950s as part of the Eisenhower Expressway’s construction.
“I think it’s such an important thoroughfare,” Recht said of Wells Drive. “You got all those people coming in on the Eisenhower, who want to connect to Lake Shore Drive, who want to do other things. I think you really have to keep that.”
The Park District said it’s soliciting public feedback on the framework plan until mid-September.
Pellot said the team will use the feedback to prioritize the plan’s proposals then unveil the final document to the public, before the Park District board votes on the measure in December.
“It’s so great to be able to see a reimagining of the historic core,” Ramirez-Rosa said.