LINCOLN SQUARE — Earlier this year, supporters of Jacob Park were thrilled to receive a $206,000 grant that would fund improvements to an adjacent parcel bought for the park in 2013 from the Chicago Transit Authority.
That elation turned to dismay when the improvements, begun the first week of December, involved the Park District cutting down nearly every tree on the former CTA plot.
"Brokenhearted by the cutting down of all the cottonwoods! We have lost a lot of the charm of the park!" one neighbor posted on Facebook.
Patty Wetli says neighbors hope the small park will one day provide a nice place to enjoy the river:
While park advocates had been prepared for the clearing of the CTA lot's overgrown vegetation in order to grade the site, the removal of the majority of trees, which provided shade for Jacob Park's playlot, caught many by surprise.
"We were informally told the large cottonwood could stay," Ben Ranney, a neighbor who had lobbied for the acquisition of the CTA land, responded on Facebook.
According to neighbor Nate Hutcheson, who reached out to DNAinfo Chicago via email, residents confronted Park District employees while the clear-cutting was in progress and and were told the tree was hollow and needed to come down.
"How about a little heads up?" Hutcheson said. The Park District "could have done a little outreach before starting the chainsaws. We feel pretty let down by their failure to communicate plans."
The Park District did not respond to requests for comment.
While not disputing the Park District's assessment of the tree's health, Hutcheson said advance warning of the cottonwood's removal — a tree one neighbor said made "June look magical as if it were snowing" — would have given advocates a chance to salvage the tree's trunk or stump, perhaps to incorporate into the park as seating or play features.
Losing the tree was a huge disappointment, Hutcheson said, "but the feeling that the neighbors' interests got bulldozed without even a courtesy call was a close runner-up."
As of Wednesday, all stumps had been cleared from the property and the ground was covered in fresh wood chips. Chainlink fences that had circled the CTA lot had also been removed, allowing access to the Chicago River, and a stand of pine trees had been planted along the park's boundary with the CTA's Brown Line tracks.
Just .39 acres, Jacob Park, 4674 N. Virginia Ave., nearly doubled in size when the Park District and CTA struck a deal in 2013 in which .26 acres from the CTA, previously used as a staging area during the Brown Line reconstruction project, was bought for $99,000.
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