Chicago Wilderness Magazine - Revealing Chicago

Revealing Chicago

Visions of Promise Amidst Patterns of Concern

Photos by Terry Evans
Words by Stephen Packard

Chicago Wilderness has envisioned our region dramatically transformed — to work better for both people and nature. Revealing Chicago: An Aerial Portrait, a new book by acclaimed photographer and Chicagoan Terry Evans, helps us take a bird’s-eye look at ourselves — and think about our future.

Evans spent 18 months flying over the pounding — and sometimes pounded — heart of the heartland. Consider the photos below, from left to right.

Northerly Island, constructed in accord with Chicago’s famous Burnham Plan, was supposed to be a park. Instead it got expropriated for an airport (then called Meigs Field) that was handy to a few people with private jets, but useless for most Chicagoans. Mayor Richard M. Daley won rave reviews for his plan to restore it to a nature park, and he took a bold step toward making it happen when he foiled special interests by bulldozing Xs in the runway at midnight. A restored and natural Northerly Island would add to the jewels along the Loop’s lakefront. It will leave a powerful and peaceful legacy in the heart of Chicago.

City Hall’s “green roof” (see “Birds on a Cool Green Roof”) is an example that can help transform the city’s climate and amenities. In the long run, living roofs can be cheaper to maintain, improve the local climate, provide habitat for wildlife, and make some welcome pleasant spaces where people live and work.

Lakehurst Mall foundered and closed, leaving messes of many kinds. Unplanned development often wrecks two areas, the one where it plops down, and the one it steals the business from.

Farms at the edge of suburbia can survive only with public protection and support. Metropolis 2020 and Chicago Wilderness are working towards a larger plan that will do for future generations of the larger metropolitan area more of what the Burnham Plan tried to do a century ago.

A major exhibit featuring more than 80 oversized photos from Revealing Chicago, with text by Charles Wheelan, will be on display at Millennium Park in the Loop from June 10 to October 10. For more information about the exhibit, presented by Chicago Metropolis 2020, Openlands Project, and the City of Chicago, visit revealingchicago.org. To purchase the book, click here.

Urban woodlands

Today, Hyde Park and the whole South Side of Chicago resemble an open woodland from the air. Even in such areas of densest human development, birds look down and see stopover habitat as they migrate along the lakefront. If you’re a warbler or a tanager fresh from the Amazon and heading for your summer home in the North Woods, you can eat, rest, and survive your enemies in Hyde Park a lot better than you can in cornfields.

Density as a gift

But perhaps the best gift cities can offer to nature is the density of human populations that yields the political constituency for the creation and protection of nearby forest preserves and similar wild areas.

Designed with nature

Prairie Crossing is a model for suburban development that saves space for agriculture and nature. Like many new developments, it is out in the country (as some people prefer). But it is denser development, including apartments in a village square, and it is near two commuter train stops. It is close to forest preserves, and the yards and common areas are maintained in part as extensions of natural lands. Residents are encouraged to landscape with native plants, and rainwater is channeled into healthy wetlands. Natural processes, including controlled burns, are a part of the community culture. A larger conservation effort, which accompanied the development, protected thousands of acres of adjacent prairies, woodlands, and wetlands.

True prosperity?

In the typical unplanned suburb, everyone’s got a little something, but some people feel the lack of a great something. How many homeowners would accept smaller yards with no pools in exchange for one big pond for swimming, fishing, and boating in safe walking distance — and one big forest preserve to walk or bike to?

From lawn to oasis

The “Magic Hedge” was world famous among birders for the rare species it attracted. In Chicago’s lakefront park near Montrose Avenue, it stood between the beach (bottom of photo) and a marina (top). All the land around one narrow hedge was mowed lawn until the Chicago Park District teamed up with birders to restore the whole area to grassland and woodland habitat. From daybreak until sunset, experienced birders point out their finds to novices and curious passersby. It was magic before, but restoration made it better. Even coyotes and foxes have returned.

Hotspot

The Museum of Science and Industry and dense development are friendly neighbors to Jackson Park where ball fields, a golf course, and lots of nature raise people’s spirits and, as some insist on pointing out, their property values. Neighboring Wooded Island, another birding hotspot, also fills the primal human need for everyday nature.