Join Friends of Fairstead for their Spring 2018 Lecture: What is a Park For? Olmsted, Obama, and the Meaning of Urban Language, featuring Carlo Rotella, Director of the American Studies Program at Boston College. Register here.
In 2017 Barack Obama announced that he would build his presidential library in Chicago’s Jackson Park, one of most important big-city parks designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Despite widespread admiration for the Obamas and hopes that the library will give the area a much-needed economic boost, this plan has raised concerns about drastically transforming such a vital piece of the nation’s system of urban public green spaces. The resulting debate takes up fundamental questions about the meaning of urban landscape: How do we balance a park’s various purposes? What is the relationship between the park and the surrounding neighborhoods? What—and who—is a park for? Finding answers requires digging not only into the archives that hold records of the South Side’s spatial and social histories but also into the imaginations of South Siders whose identities have been shaped by the enormous green fact of Jackson Park.
6:00pm Reception, 7:00pm Lecture.