HYDE PARK — Historic landscape experts want to know what South Siders think of their ideas for a new road cutting through Jackson Park, adding horses to Washington Park and other ideas.
Patricia O’Donnell, of Heritage Landscapes, and her team are coming back to the South Side at 5 p.m. on Feb. 8 at the Washington Park Refectory, 5531 S. Russell Drive, to talk about plans for how Jackson and Washington parks could be updated while maintaining the vision of their designer, Frederick Law Olmsted.
O’Donnell is working on a framework plan for both parks as part of a collaboration between the Army Corps of Engineers, Chicago Park District and Project 120, which are currently doing major landscape renovations and planning a potential visitors center for Jackson Park.
O’Donnell brought ideas to the Washington Park Refectory in November that included doubling the amount of trees in Washington Park and creating a new one-lane westbound street through Jackson Park.
The ideas are being discussed without trying to guess the biggest change coming to one of the parks, the Obama presidential library.
“The reason we’re not talking about the presidential library is because it’s happening at a whole other level,” O’Donnell said in November.
Other ideas O’Donnell has come up with for the parks include moving the driving range in Jackson Park to restore Olmsted’s plan for a 40-acre meadow on the lakefront and dramatically reducing Cornell Drive to two lanes from six.
The team is also conducting a survey of how people use the parks, which is available online.
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