Photo District News-August 2002
A DAY AT THE PARK
by Christopher D. Ringwald
Ah, the public realm. Sounds so quaint, so passé, so very 19th century in today’s free-market culture of private pleasures. Yet the proud public domain remains cast in green in the big urban parks that were built in a burst in the late 1800s and early 1900s by an egalitarian society with lawns and gardens and rowboat lakes for all.
In Chicago Parks Rediscovered, resident and photographer Frank Dina presents one city’s recreational landscape in all its remarkably well preserved glory. Though some of Chicago’s parks have been restored in recent years, others weathered time on their own. “Even after all these years of neglect, what’s surprising is how good they look,” said Dina. One reason: good designs, by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jens Jensen and others who worked in the heyday of the City Beautiful movement and sought to create naturalistic landscapes inside urban boundaries.
Their time was that of the Progressive Era, when reformers worked to clean up corrupt city governments and improve the lot of the immigrants and poor who were packed into tenements. Parks provided breathing room, healthful recreation and moral uplift. Jensen, a Chicago parks administrator in 1905-21, declared it uncivilized “to permit less fortunate residents of our city to live and multiply in unhealthy surroundings that are devoid of beauty.”
Dina’s 54 photographs reveal parks made for kings and queens: horse stables modeled on a German baronial style, twisting lakes, colonnaded bath-houses, semicircular pergolas and even an 1874 suspension footbridge that predates skyscraper engineering by ten years. Built well, these have lasted well.
Much of the parkland was laid out as prairies and wetlands using native plants that survive with little maintenance—another reason for its endurance. One picture shows a grotto built of stratified stonework to evoke the rock ledge of an Illinois River bluff. You know it’s fake, but it still works its deceptive magic on the soul.
Dina said people flocked to downtown parks on Lake Michigan, such as Grant and Lincoln,but not to equally impressive ones as Humboldt, Columbus, Garfield and Douglass in west and south Chicago, often for fear of crime, which he called overstated. In his three years of shooting, 1996 to 1999, “nothing ever happened; I had no incidents, though I got panhandled once or twice,” said Dina. “My main purpose with the book was to show some of the other parks that people don’t usually get to.”
A soft-spoken native, Dina works as a staff photographer for an audio manufacturer and lives with his wife in the Ravenswood neighborhood in north Chicago. Previously, his elective photography was done in the American Southwest. “Then I was out shooting one day, and I wandered into Humboldt Park, and I thought there hadn’t been a book on Chicago parks in a long time. I didn’t know of any.” He began shooting, doing his own prints in borrowed space and shopped a mock-up to 12 to 15 publishers. As luck would have it, two other books—neither directly competitive—were issued in the year before Dina’s came out in December.
His worst moment? “When I found out that the park district was doing a book, and they had already hired photographers, and I wasn’t one of them,” said Dina. But in a classic case of the worst-thing-being-the-best-thing, he soon landed a publisher and a grant to help with his costs.
Almost no people, and few cars, appear in the final images. At first he included people, then took them out. “I wanted to show how parks can benefit the community,”said Dina. “It was too literal with people. The landscape says it better.”
Which is the effect achieved. One sees these pictures and wants to step right in to stroll or fly a kite or smell the flowers. Dina began his work in 1996,“the time of Newt Gingrich and government-bashing. ”His project answers those who want to shrink the public sector and leave all citizens alone in their quest for space and play. “Parks are there for everybody, and everybody agrees on them, that they’re a good thing.”After a long-term erosion in respect and care of public facilities, many cities have boosted spending and manpower in their parks. In recent years, Chicago has done so, “in a big way,” said Dina. A 1982 civil rights suit on behalf of minority neighborhoods redirected funds to some of the parks in this volume.
The book includes, thankfully, a map of the city and featured parks, and a concise and useful introduction by Jeff Huebner, a Chicago arts writer. Most images are crisp and well composed or framed and often dramatic. The overall effect is to make the viewer wonder,“You mean these were built for us?” With more than 7,000 acres in its 500-plus parks, Chicago is well endowed. Its greenery, as Huebner notes, is all the more precious as suburbs blot out the surrounding countryside. Dina’s fine photography shows that some of the best preserves of nature are now in the city and often near people who can least afford alternatives, justas originally intended. Ultimately, Dina’s photography celebrates this triumph of design and democracy.
Directly through Northwestern U. Press OR AMAZON (out of stock-long wait)