At the second of three community meetings about the development of the $30 million Tiger Woods-designed golf course in the south side of Chicago, residents raised concerns about the emphasis on golf for the public park. A lack of coordination among the golf course designers and those developing the Obama Presidential Center is also raising red flags.
Conflicts between different priorities for Jackson Park and the $30 million Tiger Woods golf course in the south side of Chicago have not yet been hashed out. The designers of the golf course have yet to talk to the designer of the landscape that will surround the planned Obama Presidential Center, columnist Blair Kamin wrote for the Chicago Tribune.
The lack of coordination threatens the promise that the center and golf course will endow Chicago’s south lakefront with a park equivalent in quality to Millennium Park or Lincoln Park, the Tribune reported.
“We want the best park in America to be on the South Side of Chicago, and why not?” Michael Strautmanis, vice president of civic engagement for the Obama Foundation, the nonprofit charged with building the center, said.
C&RB has reported on the project since its was announced in December 2016.
But creating a great park is easier said than done, especially when visions clash. Take a major feature of Frederick Law Olmsted’s post-1893 world’s fair design for Jackson Park—an expansive “great lawn” in the northeast section of the park. In 1899, parts of the great lawn were remade into the first public golf course west of the Alleghenies. The course no longer exists, but part of its footprint now contains a driving range that serves the 18-hole Jackson Park Golf Course to the south. The driving range is a blatant violation of Olmsted’s vision for the park. It slices up an open space. Non-golfers can’t use it, the Tribune reported.
A 2016 Park District plan for Jackson Park called for moving the range to the park’s southwest quadrant, enabling the restoration of the great lawn. Yet the Woods plan would expand the range, the Tribune reported.
Beau Welling, senior design consultant at Woods’ TGR Design, said the expansion is needed to accommodate 300-yard drives by professional golfers; such tournaments can be financially lucrative for their organizers and help attract tourists willing to pay hefty greens fees, the Tribune reported.
If approved, Welling said, the plan would extend the driving range about 50 to 75 yards northward, eliminating tennis courts. In other words, the enlarged range would further colonize this area of the park for golf. That raises the question: Should Woods’ star power cancel the Park District’s plan to restore the original Olmsted lawn? The issue never came up at Wednesday’s meeting. Nor did other essential matters, the Tribune reported.
Rebekah Scheinfeld, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation, made a plausible case that the city can carve out new parkland around the Obama center. While there is a lot to like in the landscape plan for the area around the Obama center, designed by Brooklyn-based Michael Van Valkenburgh, there was little discussion of how that new landscape would relate to the park as a whole, the Tribune reported.
Reflecting former President Barack Obama’s desire to make the center a populist gathering place, Van Valkenburgh is suggesting things like a children’s play area, a sledding hill, community gardens and an oval-shaped lawn, able to host outdoor movies or ball-playing, that also would be conducive, as Strautmanis joked, for “chillin’ and grillin’.”
The planned golf course, which would replace the 18-hole Jackson Park Golf Course and the 9-hole South Shore Golf Course, also needs to be viewed with an eye toward how it would relate to the overall park design, the Tribune reported.
Another priority is keeping greens fees low so the course can achieve the democratic mission Welling described—providing “affordable and accessible” public golf, the Tribune reported.
Many other issues need to be explored in the next two community input sessions, which are scheduled for Saturday and Tuesday. As some residents of Woodlawn and other neighborhoods along Jackson Park said Wednesday, they fear the center will spark increases in property taxes and rents that will force them out, the Tribune reported.
A separate report in Chicago’s local CBS affiliate noted that a number of speakers at the second of three meetings about the project said there is too much emphasis on golf, at the expense of Jackson Park’s athletic fields, hiking trails, pedestrian access and other features such as the Sunken Gardens.
“The natural restoration, which just got turned into a golf course (in the initial proposals) is outrageous, and frankly, disgusting,” said one woman who did not wish to be identified.
The golf course proposal, publicly unveiled last week after a year of planning, would take the two existing courses, nine holes at South Shore Cultural Center and 18 holes at Jackson Park, and transform them into a single 18-hole championship course—one that Mark Rolfing of the Chicago Parks Golf Alliance said would be the “premier urban golf course” in the country and a possible stop on the PGA tour, CBS reported.
Golfing legend Tiger Woods is the designer. Rolfing counts Woods as a long-time friend. He said Woods is eager to go forward with the reconfiguration, which would move the clubhouse from the historic South Shore Cultural Center to the Obama library itself, CBS reported.
That drew even more criticism from community residents, one of whom said the natural restoration at the former country club “would be transformed into a fairway so that Tiger Woods can hit a golf ball across the beach.”
Bird watchers said they liked the proposed closure of Cornell Drive. Kenneth Newman disagreed and argued in favor of better access and better security in and around the proposed Center. “I don’t watch birds. I don’t concern myself with certain things, (and) quality of life type things are not really my big issue,” he said. “But when I go to the beach, I like not getting shot.”
Another man argued that closing Cornell Drive and obliterating the intersection of 63rd Street and Cornell would erase a historic landmark that commemorates the starting point for the world’s first auto race. One man drew applause when he said the Presidential Center is being jammed into a park that already has too little space for everyday use, and said the proposal to place it in Washington Park should be revisited, CBS reported.
A third meeting is scheduled for today, June 27, CBS reported.
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