Sora in a Soccer Field: Environmental Justice in Douglass Park

Graffiti on festival fencing in Chicago’s Douglass Park, the week before Riot Fest, September 2022. Photo by David Hoyt.

words by David Hoyt

This article was originally published in the October/November 2022 issue of COS’s official membership publication, The Chicago Birder. To receive this quarterly digital magazine, become a COS member today!

On a warm Wednesday morning in September 2022, the Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners held a regular meeting at which they were to take public comments. The majority of these concerned the leasing of Douglass Park to a private music festival called “Riot Fest.” Classified by the Park District as a “large scale event,” the festival draws approximately 40,000 attendees over a three-day period. It is one of three such ticketed-entry, commercial music festivals that occupied the park in Summer 2022. To accommodate this and other festivals, Lawndale residents claimed that the park was put out of commission for nearly seven weeks of the summer.

Just before the meeting, held in the community center at Fosco Park, I met some people holding signs calling for Riot Fest to get out of Douglass Park. I asked them to name their biggest objection to the festival. One man, a young father of two, who had bicycled twenty minutes from Lawndale to get there and who gave his name as Joe, put it simply.

“I want my park back.”

At the board meeting, I heard dozens of objections to Riot Fest and other “mega-fests” being allowed to fence off the park from public use. All of them were reasonable, but this one encapsulated them all. It put the idea of what a park is front and center. The many legitimate concerns—access to the two hospitals adjacent to the park by emergency vehicles, traffic congestion, noise, litter, displacement of summer athletic activities, damage to the site, gentrification—stem from the private enclosure of a public space.

As with Douglass Park, and urban parks across the United States, the city park represents a social contract drawn up at the dawn of America’s industrial age, in which the public is provided access to a natural space as an antidote to the pollution, rigors, and commercial pressures of life in a feverishly growing metropolis. From their origins in the mid-nineteenth century, public parks were intended to be free to all, open to immigrants and native born, and green. Amidst the richness of the nonhuman, they were to offer a place where nature would enhance physical health and allow for the mixing of people across social divides.

“I want my park back” reminds us of this deeply rooted heritage, one that brings nature and civic mindedness together in a way that prefigures the modern concept of environmental justice. For well over a century, before it became commonplace for parks to be fenced up and leased out like so much fungible square footage in a convention center, city parks were not just pleasant places where events are held outside, but organs of democracy. And in our age of accelerating environmental crisis, this statement reasserts the centrality of nature in the democratic social contract.

Parks get people into nature. Nature is good for people. And it is also good for birds.

Former Lawndale resident and artist Joshi Radin taught herself to draw the birds of Douglass Park during the Covid-19 pandemic. (With permission of Joshi Radin. Shown at the Chicago Artists Coalition, “Survey Two,” July 2021.)

I often remember my first sighting of a species. That’s why a certain corner of Chicago’s Douglass Park, just beyond the northwest corner of Ogden and California, in a small grove of fruiting hawthorns old enough to have been planted by Jens Jensen, is imprinted in my memory as the place I saw a Golden-winged Warbler. There’s the dashing yellow cap, of course, but in the shadow of the hawthorns all I could make out was enough to make the identification: that wash of traffic sign yellow, almost like the stroke of a calligraphy brush laid across the wing.

I also have a video of a bird, taken by a friend in North Lawndale. It’s a bird that I’ve once heard but have never seen: a Sora. That first occasion for me was in the marshy and exotic Orland Grassland in southern Cook County. To receive a cellphone video of a Sora taken in an expansive soccer field south of Ogden Avenue was, therefore, startling. Most of the more bird-friendly habitat is in the northern half of the park, where there are several large lagoons, more trees, and substantial native plantings.

This park really does get an incredible variety of birds, I thought, and they use every square inch of it. Had the bird landed a week later, our migrating Sora would have descended into a fenced-off, heavily trampled field strung with portable toilets, sound stages, and temporary structures of various sizes, all home to the last of three large-scale festivals to be hosted in the park over the summer of 2022. For twelve hours daily over the course of three days, the park would have been home to Riot Fest. It would have been very loud, brightly lit at night, and full of people—some 40,000 of them altogether. Another 40,000 had previous come through for Summer Smash in mid-June. A new festival, Heatwave, was introduced to the park in July.

All this activity in a public park that is also heavily used bird habitat is probably not good for birds. Studies of the impact of urban noise and light pollution on birds is a young but growing area of research, but early findings suggest that both nocturnal illumination and loud noise can cause immediate problems for some species, resulting in smaller broods during breeding season (June–July), and in weaker, less alert or resilient birds during migration, when they face the most danger (September–October). This is a cause for concern in a city like Chicago, already a deadly byway for birds in migration.

Unlike the drastic declines of certain deliberately hunted wildlife populations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as bison, wolves, and waterfowl, the decline of many species in our era is often the cumulative effect of factors that contribute to a reduction of fitness—death by a thousand cuts, one might say. Though more research is needed on the effect of urban stressors on birds (and some of it is being done at Lincoln Park Zoo’s Urban Wildlife Institute), a prudent inference would be that the presence of multiple loud and brightly lit festivals in a location as species rich as Douglass Park could be harmful to both breeding and migratory populations that are already dealing with the challenges of living in and crossing over a dangerous urban area.

And we know that a lot of birds do use Douglass Park. In the summer of 2022, heartening data was released by the Bird Conservation Network (BCN), based on 22 years of rigorous sampling, showing that several species are doing better in the heavily urbanized, greater Chicago region than in the rest of Illinois. This is attributed by BCN to the rich inventory of greenspace woven throughout the city of Chicago, Cook County, and the surrounding region.

Chicago’s sizable park system is a part of that inventory. Like Chicago itself, the park is a cosmopolitan way station for migrating birds, such as our soccer field Sora. At least 20 species breed there, according to Douglass Park bird monitor Eric Gyllenhaal. The current species count in the park, as of early September, 2024, is 211. Humboldt Park to the north weighs in at 230. Both come in well below the major lakefront hotspots, but ahead of many Forest Preserve tracts further inland that have more acreage.

Jens Jensen’s Record Drawing of 1912 for Douglas Park, showing the Meadow and Flower Hall south of Ogden. (Source: Chicago Public Library Digital Collections.)

As we confront the reality of climate change, our views of green space and parks are shifting. Parks, especially larger ones, can be understood as what historian of Chicago parks Colin Fisher calls “green machines.” These are places that are always—during a soccer match, family picnic, or even when “empty”—working to sequester carbon, hold storm water, remove particulates from the air, and provide wellness to people and wildlife. A park that is good for birds is very likely a park that is good for people, too.

These aims, in the context of today’s urban budget crises, may strike some as quaint, or even obsolete. A 2014 study commissioned by the Chicago Park District posed the question, “Is there a quantitative way to measure [the parks’] value?” It attempted to find an answer by measuring two things: the effect of parks on nearby property values, and the revenue streams generated by certain special assets, like Soldier Field.

The authors determined that, as any Chicago real estate speculator could have told them, yes, proximity to small parks increases property values. The Chicago Park District points to this study in justification of its policy of leasing space to large-scale events. “Over the years, we’ve been able to hold the line on property taxes,” the District’s Chief Administrative Officer told the Board of Commissioners at its September 2022 meeting.

An accompanying pie chart showed that annual permit fees from all festivals amounted to $19.8 million, or just under 4 percent of the District’s total revenue. Riot Fest revenue, presumably, makes up a smaller portion of this already minor stream.

There are, however, objective features of the parks which the 2014 study did not measure that may be worth an equivalent amount, but they require a broader framework of accounting. The value of nature experiences to human health in terms of greater longevity or productivity, or of the ecosystem services provided by green space, which can also be measured and quantified, are not assessed, or even mentioned. In the era of global pandemics, quarantines, and ecosystem collapse, perhaps this mercantile view of parks is too narrow.

The Forest Preserve District of Cook County, for example, is pursuing a different strategy. It will be asking voters in the upcoming midterm elections for their assent to a property tax increase of 0.025 percent. [Ed. note: This referendum was approved.] Supporters of the tax hike aren’t shy about highlighting their value proposition. For a small increase on a levy that is already less than 1 percent of the average homeowner’s tax bill, they get the benefits of the green machine. “Our forest preserves,” argue advocates, “play an important role in helping to protect water and air quality, as well as habitat for wildlife. They give residents of all ages a place to explore nature, be active and healthy, and provide job and scholarship opportunities in communities throughout the county.”

The idea of renting out large parks for private festivals in Chicago was an idea born in the early aughts to enhance revenue streams. It was preceded by several decades of experimentation with the privatization of other city goods. Beginning under Mayor Richard M. Daley in the 1990s, several minor city services were contracted out to private contractors. Then came the Chicago Skyway. When Daley then sold the city’s parking meters in 2009, the mayor said that the money freed from maintenance of city garages and meters would go to upkeep of neighborhood parks.

This is the context in which Chicago’s largest, private music festival, Lollapalooza, became a permanent fixture of Grant Park in 2005. That same year, Riot Fest established itself in Chicago. In 2012, it made Humboldt Park its permanent base. Three years later, responding to concerns over the enclosure of and damage to the park caused by Riot Fest, the 26th Ward Alderman asked Riot Fest to leave the neighborhood.

At the time, one Humboldt Park resident sounded a warning to her neighbors in Douglass Park, the festivals next destination: “Understand and be aware of the damage that was done here in Humboldt Park, and really look and see whether or not it’s actually worth for the festival to [be here].”

Riot Fest has now been in Douglass Park more than twice as long as it was in Humboldt Park, and Lawndale residents are exasperated with its imposition on their communities. They are also exasperated that, after raising their objections for seven years, the Chicago Park District has remained intransigent. In conversation with neighbors, or on the social media feeds of such organizations as Únete La Villita or Little Village Environmental Justice Organization (LVEJO), all the objections that came up when Riot Fest was in Humboldt Park come up again and again. They are a litany.

In testimonials objecting to Riot Fest collected over the summer of 2022 by Únete La Villita, access to green space is a prominent theme, for purposes ranging from soccer to nature contemplation. Apart from Douglass, several testimonials note, there is very little green space elsewhere in the area, which is also home to major sources of industrial pollution.

Some testimonials even approach a language of the park as a green machine.

“The parks” wrote Xavier in his testimonial to Únete La Villita, “house many wild animals and plants that have their impact in aiding nature and the environment as a whole.

American Woodcock. Douglass Park, November 13, 2021. Photo by Eric Gyllenhaal.

Looking south from Ogden Avenue at the entrance to Riot Fest, over the top of fencing draped in black nylon fabric, you can see the upper portion of a flat-roofed, tiered Prairie School gateway in moderate disrepair. Its orientation, parallel to Ogden and drawing the visitor’s gaze toward downtown, suggests a grand design. “It’s a beautiful structure,” lifelong Lawndale Resident Denise Ferguson told me. “To stand there at night and look downtown, it’s a beautiful sight.” But instead of fixing it, she notes, Riot Fest fences it off. The area beyond the gate, once a formal garden and reflecting pool known as Flower Hall, was to be the site of a VIP bar for premium ticket holders.

It’s not known if Jens Jensen himself designed the gate, but he did draw up the redesign of Douglass Park in 1912, when he was Superintendent of the West Park System, so it very likely conformed to his aesthetic intention. Jensen made another major change to the park at that time: he filled in the large lagoon south of Ogden with a broad plain meant to recall the pre-settlement landscape of Illinois.

Jensen’s meadow and gate are two of several design features that won Douglass Park inclusion in the Chicago Park Boulevard System on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018. It is also where Riot Fest takes place.

The irony of putting a private festival in Jensen’s meadow could not be greater. No other figure from the founding era of the Chicago region’s parks, playgrounds, and preserves was more explicit in emphasizing the connections between public parks and democracy, or the restorative function of green space in a crowded, polluted, industrial city bursting with immigrants from around the world.

Jensen’s predecessors scorned the prairie as a landscape. In the prairie, Jensen saw the sublime. He wanted to bring a sense of it to people he worried might not otherwise know it. He would never have roped it off and sold tickets for admission.

And he brought the birds, which still come, as you can see if you stroll through the hawthorns that are still there.