Destroying a Park to Save It: The Tea House that Ate Connors Park

 

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In his newsletter to constituents on Saturday, 42nd ward alderman Brendan Reilly unveiled what he called "exciting new improvements to scheduled to begin this season in Connors Park."  You know, like a Children's Museum in Grant Park.

Connors Park, one of the Chicago's oldest, dating back to 1848, is an absolutely wonderful space, triangular in shape, bounded by Rush and Wabash, Chestnut and Delaware, marked by a series of  majestic trees, dominated by the great elm at the north corner, which soars in proud defiant, counterpoint to the poorer, man made skyscrapers all around it.

There's also a small fountain, a pergola added in 1999, memorials to William J. Connors, and benches that apparently have all recently been removed after being vandalized..

The backstory to the announcement is Reilly's battles with the Park District to keep Connors adequately maintained . . .

Due to the lack of responsiveness from the previous Park District regime, Alderman Reilly detailed the 42nd Ward Superintendent and his Streets and Sanitation crews with regular emptying of Park District trash receptacles and removing homeless debris from Connors Park - despite the fact this is a Park District responsibility.

So Reilly went looking for a private concessionaire to take over responsibility for the park in exchange for letting them operate there.  He found his mark in Argo Tea, which already has an outlet in Loyola's Lewis Tower, a block south.

Alderman Reilly is pleased that the Chicago Park District has selected Chicago-based Argo Tea as the concessionaire to operate in Connors Park. Per the Concession Agreement, Argo Tea will be making a 15-year commitment to Connors Park and will assume full responsibility not only for new landscaping and maintenance of the park - but also the perimeter streetscape planters in the public-right-of-way.

The Alderman believes this public / private partnership will help to ensure basic maintenance, new landscaping each season, increased security, dramatically improved aesthetics and the addition of a true amenity for the surrounding neighborhood.

The more I look at this project, the angrier I get.  There's nothing wrong with the actual building.  As pictured in the single illustration released by Reilly it's light and airy.  It is also an overbearing intrusion into one of Chicago's rarest resources - open space in the center city.

The project is being sold with a series of half-truths.  The teahouse, says Reilly"will occupy 1,200 square feet of the nearly 17,000 square foot park."  17,000 square feet?  Look at the plan, which is detailed at 1/20 of an inch to a foot.  At that scale, the block, at its widest point, is approximately 100 feet, at its longest, about 200: 20,000 square feet.  Except that the block is slightly irregular triangle.  Divide by two, you get 10,000 square feet.  More importantly, the actual landscaped area of the park in the drawing is, at its largest points, 60 feet wide by 160 feet long, or 9,600 square feet.  Divide by 2: 4,800 square feet. 

So that 1,200 square foot teahouse, in actuality, is taking up about about a quarter of the actual space of the park.  Oh, and did I mention the "10 foot high "green walls" covered with vines - adding another 700 square feet of (vertical) green," basically shafts of shear wall to cover up utilities?

Connors Park becomes a moat of landscaping for the Argo Tea pavilion.

In one of the densest areas of the city, one of the last vestiges of open space is to be replaced by a structure eating up a quarter of the park, placed centrally to overwhelm the composition and slice and dice the landscape that remains into discontinuous adjuncts to the building.  The view of the great tree to the north is now shifted to the walkways along the periphery, or competing with the 17 foot height of the tea house.  If it survives.  The plan references a new gravel walkway with "minimal site disturbance to protect large tree." In the mega-built heart of the city, a rare tree like the one at Connors Park should get landmark protection against such "disturbance", however minimal.

We are also promised "permanent benches " that "collapse and lock at night."  I can see the tourist brochures now: Welcome to Chicago, the city that collapses and locks down at night.

This is the urbanism of exhaustion and surrender, a declaration that the third largest city in the United States, in one of its most traveled and wealthiest districts, with security cameras up the wazoo, cannot figure out how to adequately patrol a park next to an extremely popular seafood restaurant, several ultra high-end condo towers, and a five star hotel, to prevent that park from being repeatedly vandalized and overrun with vagrants. 

If this is Chicago's future, it has none.

read Reilly's full statement after the break.