A small scale, Ravinia-style outdoor music venue could replace a three-hole golf course at Douglas Park in North Lawndale under a conceptual plan floated by the local alderman.
“My thought would be something similar to Ravinia where you can come, put out a blanket and sit and bring a picnic basket and enjoy music from the community or a reputable artist. It’s in your backyard and you don’t have to travel to Highland Park to do so,” said Ald. Michael Scott Jr. of the 24th Ward.
Instead of a golf course, he said he envisioned a concrete staging area supplied with electric power where concerts could be held for 2,500 to 5,000 people seated on the grass. He said he didn’t know whether such a plan would eventually include a bandshell, should the Park District and the community want to move forward.
An outdoor music venue could build on the relationship Douglas Park has with Ravinia’s music program, but it also could sever ties with a golf program intended to introduce the game to young people in the Lawndale community, although golf participation has dipped nationwide in recent years.
Chicago Park District CEO Michael Kelly said he met with Scott to discuss what could replace the underperforming golf course, possibly a concert venue or festival grounds.
The section of the park where the golf course is located is “not big enough for Riot Fest. I want to be clear Riot Fest is not going there,” he said. “However, I think there is something we can do that the community would embrace. It would be smaller than these 20,000, 30,000, 40,000-person events and it would be a good economic driver for the community.”
Douglas Park, a previous venue for Riot Fest, will host the big music fest for a second year in September at the park’s south end. The golf course is located at the other end of the park, north of Ogden Avenue. The free annual Chicago Westside Music Festival also is held at Douglas Park.
The park’s small putting course has been underutilized for years, according to both Scott and Kelly.
The learning course is free to use and does not generate revenue, Park District spokeswoman Jessica Maxey-Faulkner said. The $10,000 in annual maintenance costs are covered by the Marquette Park golf course, she said. She could not provide statistics to show how the Park District would measure the golf course’s success.
The late father of the alderman was president of the Park District board in 1999, a few years after Tiger Woods first rose to prominence, when a $2.2 million deal was approved to build learning centers in three parks, including Douglas Park.
Over five years, the number of golfers in the U.S. who played at least one round has fallen from 25.7 million in 2011 to 24.1 million in 2015, according to the National Golf Foundation, a trade association.
The First Tee of Greater Chicago runs a free program at Douglas Park aimed at character development while introducing children to golf, said Executive Director Lisa Quinn. She said she anticipated serving 125 youth at Douglas Park this summer, up from 60 last year after an effort to revitalize the program through partnerships with organizations including the Boys & Girls Clubs.
The goals, Quinn said, are to “provide opportunities traditionally not available to kids in the Lawndale community and surrounding areas on the West Side and providing a safe haven for them to explore the game of golf and have caring adults and mentors there, helping them along the way.”
First Tee is willing to invest in improvements to the course, Quinn said. However, an outdoor music venue could leverage the existing relationship the Park District and Douglas Park have with Ravinia.
Ravinia has provided free weekly music lessons to the Lawndale community since 1998 as part of a partnership with the Park District and other community organizations, said Christine Taylor, Ravinia’s director of its Reach Teach Play education program. The Ravinia Lawndale Family Music School teaches on average 150 children and adults annually how to play violin, guitar and piano at four parks in the community, including Douglas Park, she said.
Additionally, Ravinia has been involved in music programs at the park’s summer day camps and neighborhood schools, she said. Beyond education, Ravinia has distributed thousands of lawn passes to residents, Taylor said.
“Our goal is to bring families together around music and have them enjoy music,” she said.
Neighborhood residents have started to hear about the concert venue idea, but no community meetings have been set yet to weigh in.
“Community members I’ve spoken with including businesses surrounding the park and residents have expressed interest in the idea but would like robust community involvement. They have some concerns about potential problems, but they are interested,” said Cathy Haibach, who has lived in North Lawndale since 2009.
Concerns center on parking, noise for Mount Sinai Hospital, employment opportunities for community members and local vendors and the impact to a nearby nature area designated as a bird and butterfly sanctuary, she said.
It’s possible a music venue and the sanctuary could co-exist, said Eric Gyllenhaal, a volunteer bird monitor for the Bird Conservation Network, who has helped track bird populations, counting roughly 190 different types of birds in the four years he’s been monitoring Douglas Park.
“From a birder’s point of view, you could put together a small music venue by the bird sanctuary and it would do OK with the birds if they left a lot of it there and upgraded the sanctuary and removed invasive vegetation,” Gyllenhaal said.
The music might not be bothersome to the birds because the noise of car traffic from Ogden Avenue, including the blaring sirens from emergency vehicles to area hospitals, hasn’t scared the birds away, he said. The vegetation also could serve as a light and noise barrier from the street if there are concerts there, he said.
If North Lawndale were to be considered a cultural destination, it could lead to people investing in the community, said Marcus Betts, co-chair of the North Lawndale Community Development Coalition. But such projects need to be vetted, he said.
“Any time you propose to permanently impact the green space in the community, there’s a certain amount of due diligence that must be exercised, and transparency is the word of the day,” Betts said.
Scott said he wants to get the Park District fully behind the idea since it is park property and identify a possible funding source before seeking community input.
Until more details are available, Friends of the Parks has no position yet on the concept. But Executive Director Juanita Irizarry is concerned over whether officials are engaging the community in a discussion about the proposal.
“We understand the community’s trepidation when a project is presented as looking like a done deal already. While the alderman says he wants to be sure it’s doable before he presents it to the community, the community is appropriately concerned it might be too late at that point to provide real input,” Irizarry said.
Before moving forward with any plan, Kelly said the community will be consulted.
“But let’s also not raise alarms that we’re bringing bulldozers out there. Nothing can be further from the truth,” he said. “We started having a conversation with the alderman and we will then go to the community. Then, we’ve got to figure out if it’s worth the investment.”
