Remember how people flooded into Millennium Park and instantly made it their own when the park opened six years ago? Something like that is happening now a short hike west of the Willis Tower.
You won't see a glistening "Bean" or a water-spewing Crown Fountain at the new Adams & Sangamon Park, which is named for two of its surrounding streets. Here's what you will see: Five off-kilter stainless steel arches that form a delightful gateway into the park. Artfully composed mounds of grass. A hip playground with bright red, custom-designed equipment.
You will also see people — an endless stream of them, sunning themselves on the mounds, pushing baby strollers, walking their dogs, hurrying to a nearby elevated stop or pausing to take in the skyline views.
Built by the Chicago Park District for an overall cost of $19.5 million, including land acquisition, environmental cleanup, demolition of existing buildings and construction, the 2.3-acre, full-block park offers a swath of much-needed open space amid the West Loop's crush of wall-to-wall condos. Like Millennium Park's Lurie Garden, it belongs to a new generation of geometrically complex, engagingly interactive and highly stylized urban parks that eschew the cliche of grass and a gazebo.
The designers, Chicago's Site Design Group, achieved a good end product because they ran a good process. They didn't impose their design. They worked closely with the West Loop Community Organization, which polled neighbors on their preferences. Playground? Yes. Skate park? No.
More than that, the designers got into the heads of the neighbors. Few have private yards. The park is the yard they share. But it's more than the sum total of everybody's open space. In the blunt words of Site Design Group principal Ernest Wong, "it gives you a place to go that is not your everyday boring life."
Diagonal pathways slice across the rectangular plot, providing shortcuts to and from the CTA's nearby UIC-Halsted Blue Line station. The irregularly shaped zones in between are either grassy mounds or sunken play areas. In one of several energy-saving touches, the dirt excavated to carve out the play zones wasn't trucked off site. It was used instead to create the mounds.
Rust-colored steel retaining walls hold some of the mounds in place. Wong and his colleagues on the job, Hana Ishikawa and Brad McCauley, deserve credit for evoking rather than erasing the West Loop's industrial grit.
Approaching, you see the mounds first. They endow the park with that rare thing in pancake-flat Chicago: topography. They're tall enough to shape roomlike outdoor spaces between them but not so tall that people feel hemmed-in and, thus, unsafe. The tallest of them, about 7 feet high, provides a splendid lookout point from which to see the Willis Tower.
You reach the mounds by passing through a series of enticing entrances, not the usual swinging gate. In the park's southeast corner, delicate river birch trees and egg-shaped concrete benches create a passage of Zen-like calm. To the northwest are those stainless-steel arches, which set an appropriately playful tone and are delightfully immersive as they release clouds of mist.
On one warm day last week, I saw a woman pushing a baby stroller through the arches. She didn't scurry. She looped around slowly, like a kid making an extra trip through a lawn sprinkler.
The sunken play areas offer their own topography and delights. The children's area features custom-designed playground equipment, like a climbing structure where kids cross from one suspended rubber platform to another. The one for dogs has a "high-tech" dog bowl that automatically fills up with water. Ever mindful of the social role that urban spaces play, Wong and his colleagues offer plenty of seating throughout the park.
People still go to parks for solitude and natural beauty; the designers deal with those needs, too. In one corner, a seat-lined pathway offers a quiet refuge. As the seasons change, maples and other trees will provide brilliant reds and other colors. Prairie grasses already create rich, ever-shifting textures as they blow in the breeze. There's even visual delight in the tire-tread patterns that bikers have left on the steel retaining walls.
True, there are problems. The park lacks a flat lawn where people can play catch. Its longest diagonal pathway consists of rigid straight lines that are unrelieved by adjoining landscape features. At the insistence of top city officials, off-the-rack metal fences line some of the park's edges, interrupting its openness. And as in any new park, the trees need time to grow so they can provide shade.
There are larger questions: In a city of shrinking budgets, how does the Park District justify spending close to double its usual per-acre construction cost on this park while others go wanting for the basics? All the condos built in the West Loop spun off tax revenue that helped pay for the park, responds Gia Biagi, the district's director of planning. "We do make major investments across the area," she adds.
There is this response, too: A decent budget is no guarantee of a good outcome. The landscape architects deserve credit for doing what they were supposed to do, crafting a dynamic green space that makes a hard-edged area of Chicago much more livable.