Conscious Choice: Made in the Shade

May 2002

Made in the Shade

The old Rookery in Lincoln Park was messy, but magical

by Jonn Salovaara

Chicago’s Lincoln Park, the actual park as distinct from the neighborhood, has long been associated in my mind with adventure. During a field trip in the fourth grade, I was taking a picture of the Hans Christian Andersen statue in the park, when a teenager, flashing a knife, grabbed my camera and fled. I spent the rest of the afternoon searching for the long-gone perpetrator from the back seat of a trawling police car, while the officers chatted with my pretty teacher.

Several years later, as young teenagers, a friend and I went by ourselves to the park to while away a school holiday. Maybe owing to the earlier theft, my friend and I slouched around the zoo speculating on the possibly evil intentions of the few other humans present on that cold and drizzly day. Eventually, we stumbled into a part of the zoo I’d never seen before: the Rookery. This was a separately fenced area, north of the zoo proper, but accessible from the zoo.

When entered from the zoo, the Rookery path descended for a bit, and then, at the bottom around a slight bend, skirted an unexpected pond. Another branch of the flagstone path climbed up to a circle of stone seats seemingly intended for some important meeting — of Indians, or pirates, or older teenagers. Sitting for a moment in that circle, I felt my adolescent cynicism dissolving. Further down the pond side, tiny pavilion structures jutted out toward the water; another little building hid in the thick trees on the steep embankment. Was it an employee bathroom or a cover for an underground lair? I was in this place for the first time on a day of adolescent liberation, and everything about it struck me as magical.

Thinking about it now, I realize that I spent preschool years mudball-fighting with siblings and friends in a ravine behind our house, a place of steep hillsides, thick plant growth, and mud perfect for ammunition. Later, my family moved to flat, dry, uninspiring places. Maybe the Rookery was my return to the ravine at long last.

More than three decades have now passed since the day I first went into the Rookery, and I’ve been back many times. At one point, the zoo added signs identifying waterfowl in the pond. Later, I saw the place suffer from neglect, with trees fallen into the water, the artificial waterfall dried up. But even at its most unkempt, the Rookery was a welcome relief from the over-determined rest of the city. As the trees grew taller over the years, the shade got thicker. When on hot summer days the zoo itself seemed over-bright, over-hot, over-humid, over-crowded, I could drop down that path into the Rookery and get away from the glare and the people. The Rookery was never crowded; maybe the darkness discouraged visitors. The shade prevented ground cover from growing; black dirt from the embankments sifted down onto the flagstones. For me, the magic survived the dirt.

I finished high school in another state. When I came back to Chicago for college, I was too busy to visit the zoo. Later, when I married, my wife and I lived across the street from the park. I began to see the Rookery again from time to time. Its eccentricity vis-à-vis the zoo only increased as time went by.

Building by building, the zoo itself was rehabbed and reconstructed. As a parent wheeling strollers through the zoo, I always felt a mix of emotions about the zoo’s changes. Somehow, the older, broken-down, shabby zoo seemed much more real than the diorama-ized zoo of the rehab. Yes, that old zoo was in essence a sort of jail for animals — for crimes unknown they were confined in their cages — but at least that seemed more honest than painting pictures of African savannas on a wall that was still a wall.

I sighed when the former reptile house became a cafeteria; I rolled my eyes when the requisites of merchandising resulted in the construction of a gift store where small mammals used to be. As the prosperity of the nineties rolled on and enabled the rehab of everything from the Sea Lion Pool to the Farm in the Zoo, I winced repeatedly to see the shabby-but-real swept aside in what seemed an ongoing effort to make the city safe for suburbanites.

All the while, the Rookery seemed immune to gentrification. Maintained even less than before, it remained a familiar place of deep shade and escape. I should have known better.

When the zoo was privatized in 1995, its administration now separate from the park district, management of the Rookery space reverted to the park district. According to Kelly McGrath, public relations spokesperson at the zoo, there was no big controversy about this. (McGrath also suggests that no one currently employed at the zoo can give the details of the zoo’s involvement with the space.)

One day, a year or two after this change of hands, as I walked along Armitage Street not far from Lincoln Park, through some kind of street fair or sidewalk sale, I saw a table sponsored by the Friends of Lincoln Park organization. This group was selling T-shirts and raising money to support the restoration of the lily pool in Lincoln Park. I’d never heard of a lily pool in Lincoln Park, and I took a closer look at the drawings displayed on the table. The lily pool turned out to be the old pond in the Rookery. For the pool to be restored, a dramatic opening up of the space to sunlight was required.

I was impelled to speak to a representative. Something in her way of explaining the project told me that she had not the slightest personal attachment to the Rookery as it was, as I had known it for decades. To her it was simply a derelict site and — I suspected — a property-value-increasing amenity waiting to happen.

While I was busy with a teaching career and raising kids, the Friends of Lincoln Park had decided to make radical changes to a public space I naively considered to belong to all the people of Chicago. Steve Zelner, the Executive Director of Friends of Lincoln Park, said the Friends had been planning to do something about the Rookery ever since their founding as an organization in 1984, "because it was in complete disrepair."

The site did begin as a Victorian lily pool in 1889, but it had been redeveloped in 1937 according to a plan drawn up by Alfred Caldwell, a landscape architect for the park district. This Caldwell plan was only ever partially completed, and even that was poorly maintained. The neglected site was shored up with a massive influx of stone works in 1966. This was the version of the Rookery I’d known and admired. Why was this version itself neglected after 1966? "It was never on the front burner of the park district; it was financial," says Zelner.

In any case, in 1997, the Friends of Lincoln Park and Chicago Park District began to prepare a plan for carrying out the Alfred Caldwell vision of 1937. Why didn’t they simply maintain more competently the 1966 version? "That was never really a plan," says Zelner.

Even that day on Armitage Street, the success of the Caldwell plan seemed an accomplished fact; I knew that somehow, those fund-raising efforts, probably reaching beyond T-shirts, would pay off. But I still hoped something would intervene. Maybe someone would change their mind. Maybe the economy would collapse before those exquisite drawings could be made real.

It didn’t. Last summer the overhaul began. Big trees were cut down, and smaller, nursery trees were planted. Old trees that remained were pruned back severely. And then the Mayor, with some other dignitaries, went to dedicate the place. The Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool, named for its original designer, will open officially on May 18.

It seems a bit ironic to me that Steve Zelner says that the primary goal of the Friends was "to return this crown jewel to the citizens of Chicago." I liked it as a diamond in the rough. It’s probably true that the trees removed were invasive species and not part of the Caldwell plan. Besides, the Friends say, there was just too much shade.

But I think a part of us is still afraid of the woods.

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