Clear-cutting for Maggie

Though strapped for cash and indeed wallowing in red ink, the City of Chicago has found the money to clear-cut an existing park and create a new one that will be named after a member of the Daley family.

The project involved cutting down 877 trees that had lived on the site, including mature ash, locust, and ornamentals, a process off-camera to most Chicagoans because of a perimeter fence screening the view.  A new park with all new trees will be erected at a cost of $55 million.

The late Maggie Daley, for whom the park will be named, has been privately memorialized with a building at De Paul University and a women’s cancer center at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

The press coverage of this expensive project has been circumspect and minimal.  And check out the webpages the Chicago Park District supposedly devoted to the public hearings: they contain not a single sentence indicating what public sentiment was.  The “hearing” is documented solely with still images devoid of words!

The park is happening.  So there, Chicago!  It will subsume the Daley Memorial Plaza that was previously an inconspicuous feature of the site.  The new landscape design was by a Brooklyn, NY, firm.