by Paolo Cisneros
cover photo Carl Giometti

Jeanette Hoyt spent part of last New Year’s Eve at the South Shore Nature Sanctuary where East 71st Street meets Lake Michigan. In between taking pictures and admiring the native grasses and lapping waves, she chatted with visitors from around the world. She was heartened to see so many people converging on the relatively wild site despite the wintry weather.

“There were people from Germany, France, Hungary, the North Shore, Chicago…” she said, trailing off. “It was just beautiful.”

Hoyt is a South Sider and an organizer with a group called Save Jackson Park. While primarily concerned with protecting the many mature trees that are slated for removal to make way for the Obama Presidential Center, Save Jackson Park is also working diligently to preserve the South Shore Nature Sanctuary. Specifically, they are working to block plans to absorb the space into a proposed PGA-caliber golf course.

For Hoyt, the effort to save the Sanctuary is as much about protecting birds and trees as it is about advocating for the communities who rely on the space. Whether her efforts will be enough to ensure the Sanctuary’s survival, however, remains an open question.

“Hollering into the wilderness”

Located on a peninsula that was previously part of the South Shore Country Club grounds, today’s Nature Sanctuary is the product of intense collaboration between South Shore residents, the Chicago Park District and local birding groups in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It is located on prime birding real estate on the shores of Lake Michigan in the middle of the Mississippi flyway. Its six acres feature discrete prairie, dunes, shrubland, savanna, woodland, and wetland ecosystems—all of which are rare on the urbanized Southeast Side. EBird users have logged 183 species at the site.

One non-natural feature, however, has put the site in the crosshairs of a design and development group headed by golfer Tiger Woods: its dramatic views of Chicago’s downtown skyline.

TGR Design has been working for several years on a plan that would combine the 18-hole Jackson Park golf course with the nine-hole South Shore golf course to create a single PGA-caliber course. The South Shore Nature Sanctuary would be replaced by portions of the new course’s 14th and 15th holes.

While the plan appears to have lost momentum in recent months according to media reports, activists like Hoyt remain wary. She and her colleagues from Save Jackson Park recently took major steps toward putting the issue on their neighbors’ collective radar. Last March, they filed petitions with the Chicago Board of Elections to place a nonbinding question on the June 28th primary election ballots in several South Side precincts. Voters in those areas will be asked, “Shall the City of Chicago and the Chicago Park District stop cutting down trees in Jackson Park and preserve the trees in South Shore Cultural Center Park.”

While results of this ballot question would be simply advisory, Hoyt is hopeful they will confirm the community’s concern about the future of the Nature Sanctuary and nearby Jackson Park.

“It’s our way of hollering into the wilderness,” she said.

Migratory oasis

High school student John Fabrycky became interested in birding several years ago, and that interest was supercharged at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic. A South Sider, he frequents parks along the lakeshore, including Rainbow Beach, Park 566, and the South Shore Nature Sanctuary. He too is concerned that the space may be lost for the benefit of a few wealthy golfers.

“It’s important for people who live in urban environments to have a retreat they can get away to and relax a little bit,” he said.

Fabrycky appreciates that Sanctuary is set back from the road, which limits the traffic noise birders might encounter at other birding hotspots within city limits. He thinks of the space as an oasis for migrating birds–idea that’s been confirmed by his recent sightings of Prothonotary Warblers, Dickcissels, and Broad-Wing Hawks.

“I feel like a lot of people enjoy the preserve as it is, and I don’t see how the golf course would be widely accessible to Chicagoans,” he said. “It’d be something for just a few.”

Matt Igleski shares that sentiment.

“The thing I like about these Chicago parks is that they’re convenient for people,” he said. “They’re accessible; there are paths and bathrooms. You can go for ten minutes or two hours.”

This accessibility makes the South Shore Nature Sanctuary an important piece of the South Side’s cultural infrastructure, Igleski said. An educator at the Lincoln Park Zoo by day, he regularly fights against the idea so common in city kids that wildlife is something that exists “somewhere else.”

Igleski, who spotted a Harris’s Sparrow among other uncommon birds on a recent trip to the Nature Sanctuary, said he appreciates efforts by conservationists to speak out forcefully on behalf of wild places.

“It feels like historically there’s always been a point where the people who want to conserve space for wildlife have to compromise,” he said. “Why is it on us to say, ‘OK, you can cut down 50 trees instead of 200?’”

Hoyt—the organizer with Save Jackson Park—taps into a similar vein of thought with her advocacy. She’s unmoved by arguments from powerful people and organizations who promise to plant saplings in exchange for cutting down mature trees. She notes that many of the trees in Jackson Park and the South Shore Nature Sanctuary were planted in preparation for the 1893 Columbian Exposition.

“That doesn’t mean they’re dying—that means they’re in their prime,” she said.

While Mayor Lori Lightfoot told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2019 that she’s “not wild” about the golf course plan, it remains anybody’s guess as to how the rest of this story will play out. Until a final decision is made, however, birders like Hoyt, Fabrycky, and Igleski will keep their fingers crossed.

Saving South Shore Sanctuary