Come One, Come All: A Reading List on Parks
November 14, 2024 at 03:30PM
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I can mark the stages of my life by the different parks I hung out in. At age 11, it was Garfield Park in Washington, DC, where I sweated it out at day camp (DC summers are best spent in front of an air conditioner). A year later, my sister and I dubbed a block-long stretch of grass a few blocks from our house “Rat Park” after a rodent sighting, a nickname that stuck for decades. By my mid-20s, I’d saved up enough to afford a studio apartment near Chicago’s Lincoln Park, where I spent most good-weather weekends walking, reading, or pretending-to-read-while-napping.
My park-going ramped up once I had children and moved to the suburbs. Whether it was the tot lot down the street, or the rambling, multi-acre oasis miles away, parks gave me and my children a crucial outlet for pent-up energy. I hovered nervously while my toddler twins navigated their first ladders and slides; spent hours playing hide-and-seek; or kicked balls across wide-open fields and called it soccer. Once, we watched in horror as a squirrel chomped through the zipper of my diaper bag to liberate the Goldfish crackers within. So much for snack time.
Large urban parks are some of the only places where people of all ages and demographics mingle. But it’s a shared ownership that can lead to controversies and drama. How should those spaces be used? What kind of structures belong there? Who can be trusted to decide?
This reading list touches on the sometimes messy, sometimes inspiring stories that unfold amid the playgrounds, walking paths, and duckponds of our local parks.
Pickleball Noise is Fueling Neighborhood Drama from Coast to Coast (Connor Sheets, Los Angeles Times, March 2022)
Most people (like me) had never heard of pickleball before 2020. Most people who now play it (also me, badly) started during the pandemic lockdown. Easy to learn and requiring minimal equipment, its popularity grew rapidly. But the demand for more places to play has put a strain on public resources, not to mention people’s tolerance.
In parks across the US, tennis courts are now being reconfigured into pickleball courts, to the dismay of tennis players and neighbors alike. A space that once could hold no more than four tennis players at a time can now accommodate 16 pickle ballers, all hitting a hard-surfaced pickleball with a wooden paddle—far louder than a padded tennis ball hitting a racquet.
Connor Sheets begins this piece in Goleta, California, an idyllic beach town about 100 miles north of Los Angeles. He sets the scene by describing a quintessential mix of pickleball players: retirees, college students, and middle-aged parents all having fun and mildly trash-talking. He then deftly explains why this seemingly inoffensive, wildly popular sport has become so controversial.
“Some of the language used to describe the internecine pickleball debate is extreme,” he writes, “but it matches the tenor of the confrontations, which often turn neighbors against one another.”
I like how Sheets focuses on a hyperlocal controversy and then explains how it relates to similar struggles throughout the country. No matter what side you’re on, pickleball’s wide appeal means you’re likely to keep seeing more and more tennis-court conversions.
On Feb. 18, as the waning winter sunlight filtered through the surrounding chain-link fence, Mike Myers dominated most of the competition. A dedicated player and leading local advocate for the sport, the 56-year-old holds court here at the Goleta Valley Community Center, smacking balls away with boastful shouts tempered by words of encouragement and advice.
“Right on the line!” he exclaimed, gesticulating across the court with his paddle after executing a particularly skillful forehand. “Nice try,” he said after another. “No way you were getting that one.”
His opponent, a 23-year-old college exchange student from Bavaria named Max Krautter, responded later in the game with a brief education in the fluid use of German expletives.
A Place of Both Solitude and Belonging: In Praise of the Park Bench (Edwin Heathcote, Literary Hub, May 2023)
Park benches have come to my rescue many times, whether as an escape from the office during lunch, or a place to collapse when I’ve walked too far in impractical shoes. This ode to the humble bench charmed me because it takes an object so many of us take for granted and examines it through the lens of history, photography, literature, and the movies, moving breezily from poet T.S. Eliot to comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. For Edwin Heathcote, a bench “suggests the city is a place in which we can belong . . . that it is not the alienating metropolis of myth but a place capable of gestures of welcome and generosity.”
Heathcote acknowledges that some benches are no longer so welcoming—in some cities, they have been redesigned with bumps and dividers to discourage people from sleeping on them. But I appreciate that he puts such measures in a larger context: people were spending the night on park benches during the Great Depression, too; clashes over the use of public space are nothing new.
But for many of us, living busy lives in crowded places, a simple bench can still be an oasis: “a small space in the melee of the metropolis where it is acceptable to do nothing, to consume nothing, to just be.”
The entire range of the human condition and emotion seems to have been captured on benches over the last century or so.
A good place to start might be Brassaï’s photo, Lovers on a Bench and a Tramp, because it captures both sides of the story. The (unusually) hatless man has his arm around the woman, of whom all we see is her hat. At first it seems an intimate embrace, but the more you look the more one-sided it seems to become, a suddenly slightly awkward encounter with the ardor mostly from one direction.
What makes the photo, though, is the man sleeping on the other side . . . The nighttime bench is unquestioningly accommodating to those with something to hide or nothing to lose, a refuge from polite society. But nothing in the city is ever truly private, attested to by the blurred, burly figure in a flat cap walking by and looking toward the photographer and, in consequence, at us.
The Real, Essential Backstory of ‘The Embrace’ (Dart Adams, Boston, February 2023)
Monuments commemorating local history are a common sight in public parks. But what was considered heroic in one era can repulse future generations. Over the past few years, for example, communities around the world have questioned and protested public displays that commemorate people and events that no longer seem worth celebrating, such as statues of Confederate soldiers in the southern United States.
But what happens when a public artwork intended to uplift is completely misunderstood—and even worse, mocked?
The Embrace, a sculpture in a prime location on Boston Common, America’s oldest public park, was supposed to symbolize love and resilience. Artist Hank Willis Thomas’ design was inspired by a photograph of Martin Luther King, Jr. hugging his wife after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Instead of a standard-issue statue, the conceptual piece shows their interlocking arms, which from one angle form the shape of a heart.
Writer and historian Dart Adams was there for the triumphant unveiling, eager to see this new monument counter the “never-ending narrative that our city is plagued by uniquely high levels of racism.” But he was dismayed when the sculpture was subsequently mocked online for looking pornographic, followed by a second wave of critiques that the design proved Boston didn’t care about Black people.
Adams’s piece is suffused with both anger and heartbreak, understandable reactions for someone who’d hoped The Embrace would spark productive conversations about the city’s history, including the fact that the Kings met and spent their early married life there. “Every aspect of the monument,” he writes, “from its design to its siting, is imbued with an awareness of Black Boston history, a history that many outsiders making comments (and many Bostonians) know nothing about.”
With this piece, Adams rescues The Embrace from online mockery and rage-baiting, repositioning it as the triumphant result of a years-long, Black-led process. But it’s clear that the scars from the unveiling still linger.
As I watched all of this unfold from the tiny screen of my phone after having witnessed the joy of the unveiling, I fired off a tweet that said, in part, “Jesus, send the meteor.” Perhaps not surprisingly, even that tweet was twisted by Trump loyalists and Proud Boy supporters as a call to destroy the monument. Instead, it was a frustrated plea to end humanity for being so ignorant and disappointing. . . . These people were under the impression that this monument was created without Black Bostonians spearheading the effort, leading the charge, and making the creative decisions themselves—and that upset me to my core.
I and others had hoped that The Embrace and everything that went into the effort would show the nation another side of a city that, while it has been plagued with racial biases, sought to honor someone who residents of the inner city of Boston have seen as an honorary Bostonian for more than three generations now. It turns out that people were too blinded by their own biases about Boston to see it.
The Drama-Filled Making of Millennium Park (Mike Thomas, Chicago, June 2024)
Chicago’s lakefront is the city’s crown jewel, an 18-mile stretch of grass and trails dotted with playgrounds, soccer fields, beaches, and harbors. Parts are tourist magnets; others are de facto backyards for locals. At its heart, in the center of downtown, is Grant Park, a stretch of open space bounded by a wall of skyscrapers on one end and Lake Michigan’s coastline on the other.
For complicated legal reasons, one section of the park remained an eyesore for decades, despite the best efforts of various city governments to clear out the parking lot and unused train tracks. When, in the late 1990s, I heard that there were finally plans to improve the space, I appreciated the effort but remained skeptical. It was great that local civic boosters (i.e., rich businesspeople) promised not to use any public taxes, but weren’t there better ways to spend money? And would this “Millennium Park” really be ready to open in two short years to mark the arrival of the year 2000?
To no one’s surprise, the project went massively over budget and years behind schedule. The local news coverage was overwhelmingly dubious or negative. But when Millennium Park finally opened in 2004 we were all proved wrong. It was an instant crowd-pleaser and has become one of the city’s most beloved public spaces by visitors and locals alike.
In this as-told-to piece, timed to Millennium Park’s 20th anniversary, Mike Thomas gets the behind-the-scenes scoop from all the relevant players, explaining how many of the cost overruns were understandable due to the bold artistic risks the planners were willing to take. Who would have predicted that a stainless-steel sculpture called Cloud Gate would be referred to lovingly as “The Bean” and show up in millions of selfies and family vacation photos? Was part of the park’s immediate success due to the fact that the mayor insisted it looked finished on Day One, which meant buying expensive full-sized trees from out of state?
At a time when “public-private partnerships” are all the rage, Millennium Park provides a case study of how a city can think big and have it pay off. And who doesn’t need a feel-good story these days?
Blair Kamin, the architectural critic at the Chicago Tribune, explains to Thomas how he kept faith in the park through years of bad press coverage:
I knew from experience, and from listening to stories that critics who were older than me told, that if this thing was a success, ultimately the cost overruns would be forgotten. The investigative stories, which were properly done, never really took the measure, as a critic can do, of the park’s artistry. And once the artistry became apparent, all of a sudden it was clear—to me, at least—that this park was going to be a tremendous attraction and one that would supercharge the revival of the area around it.
George Lucas Strikes Back: Inside the Fight to Build the Lucas Museum (Paul Goldberger, Vanity Fair, July 2018)
If Millennium Park was an unlikely success story, George Lucas’s offer to build a museum on a different part of the Chicago lakefront seemed like an easy win. The billionaire moviemaker-turned-art collector would pay all the construction costs himself and make admission free. (After marrying Mellody Hobson, a well-connected local, he’d come to consider the city a second home.)
When I first heard about the proposed museum 10 years ago, I assumed it was all but a done deal. Why wouldn’t a city perpetually strapped for money accept such largesse from a famous director like Lucas?
What I—and Lucas—hadn’t counted on was the lakefront’s almost sacred status among certain Chicagoans. Despite the fact there were already a few museums in the area, not to mention Soldier Field football stadium, a group of concerned citizens didn’t want to cede any more open space. Critiques of the building’s obtrusive architecture further strengthened the protestors’ case.
The painful, added twist was that this was the second time Lucas’s planned museum had been rejected by a major city. An earlier offer to build in San Francisco’s Presidio had been derailed by disagreements over design and concerns that Lucas’s focus on “narrative art” meant his collection was little more than glorified comic books.
Goldberger expertly narrates this years-long saga by leaning heavily on interviews with Lucas and Hobson, while also giving the museum’s detractors a fair hearing. Lucas was shocked and hurt that his generous offers kept being rebuffed; the people who organized against him were indignant that a billionaire could be so cavalier about their public land. But Goldberger’s account does clear up one misconception: Lucas’s collection of paintings, photography, and other graphic art should be taken seriously.
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is finally scheduled to open next year in Los Angeles’s Exposition Park, next to USC, where Lucas once studied. And I have to admit I’m a little jealous that LA will soon have a cultural landmark that could have been Chicago’s.
Ma Yansong’s enormous flying saucer of a building will undoubtedly be an attraction in itself, not to mention a noteworthy addition to Los Angeles’s inventory of significant new architecture. But it remains to be seen how suitable it will be as display space, and its futuristic flamboyance, paradoxically, looks as if it were designed more to evoke Star Wars than to contain the 19th-century political art and the 20th-century realist art that have become the core of Lucas’s collection. Then again, the totality of this modern container holding art of the past surely embodies Lucas’s worldview, which is at once radical and conservative, determined to look back and push forward at the same time.
Elizabeth Blackwell is the author of While Beauty Slept, On a Cold Dark Sea, and Red Mistress. She lives outside Chicago with her family and stacks of books she is absolutely, positively going to read one day.
Editor: Carolyn Wells
Copyeditor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/11/14/come-one-come-all-a-reading-list-on-parks/
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