Partners share vision for south Evanston park

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Updated: October 31, 2011 1:05PM

Evanston resident Belen Ayestaran was doing course work in ethnographic study — a discipline often used in anthropology to gain information about different societies and cultures — when she decided to apply her research closer to home, at Grey Park.

The park sits east of Main Street between Ridge and Maple avenues.

“I was interested in how people use the park, or actually how they didn’t use the park,” she said.

She joined up recently with another resident, Amina DiMarco, and won backing from the city to team up with a group, Project for Public Spaces, to create a wider vision for the space.

The not-for-profit group, based in New York, works with communities to revitalize, redesign and sometimes create new parks.

Ayestaran and DiMarco believe Grey Park is worthy of that attention, particularly in line with recent developments.

The city recently engaged consultants in the Main Street and Chicago Avenue area, attempting to attract office and retail to the area, a potential $30 million development. Farther west, officials are looking at renovating the Robert Crown Community Center and its ice rinks.

Under Ayestaran and DiMarco’s proposal, Grey Park would become a destination on Main Street. Looking west, graded lawns and mature trees would lead up to a stone amphitheater.

Small graded hills, such as those found at Westfield Old Orchard shopping center in Skokie, could offer a place for kids to play; right now their option is a rather battered-looking child’s slide. A kiosk serving trendy food could position itself at the park’s south end, serving commuters, dog walkers and visitors to Main Street, the women said.

At the park’s west end, where banners currently advertise city events that take place elsewhere, an interactive sculpture could serve as an important marker on Ridge Avenue.

These are really just ideas, Ayestaran said.

“We don’t have an agenda for what should be in the park. What we want is for Project for Public Spaces to do their community visioning process here. We want the community to come up with what’s in the park.”

The public-private project is no small undertaking. Currently, the city maintains 51 parks with playground equipment, noted DiMarco, who serves on the city’s Playground and Recreation Board. In the past two years only one play lot was redesigned and renovated, she said, and that was the play lot at Richmond and Brummel.

“If we keep deferring the maintenance on playgrounds, at this rate all our parks and surrounding neighborhoods will suffer,” she said.

Ayestaran and DiMarco are in conversation with several stakeholders in the area, including the Main Street Merchants, Albany Care, neighbors, parents from Washington School and others.

In the past, some neighborhood residents have complained about Albany Care residents smoking in the park. They also have raised concern about bringing their children to the area, because of Albany Care residents’ “monopoly”of the park.

“The problem is that there are no amenities in the park to attract a diversity of users,” Ayestaran said.

She said a recent venture, sponsoring a food truck festival in the park, shows “that if you have amenities in the park, other people will come.”

Dennis Tossi, the longtime administrator at Albany Care, has met with Ayestaran and expressed interest in working on the proposal. He said the facility has worked to maintain good relations with residents in the surrounding neighborhood, though he sometimes has to battle perceptions that Albany “owns the park.”

“I do not own the park,” he explained. “I happen to pay a lot in property taxes (roughly $400,000).”

Albany has a stake, “because my residents are citizens of Evanston,” he said.

Residents confine their smoking to a small portion of the park, he said. Albany has places inside that area designated for smoking. Albany also has a park monitor who looks out for any residents behaving improperly.

Tossi said Albany might be willing to help fund the group’s initial budget of $27,200.

The budget covers research, community design workshops, working with the city’s parks division and then drawing up a final concept. To learn more, visit the group’s website, evanstonparkscoalition.com.

“I think Belen has a vision that it could be better utilized,” Tossi said. “I would agree with that. The layout of the park doesn’t facilitate a lot of people using it — a variety of people, not just my residents.”

The venture also has the backing of Douglas Grey Udell, whose great-great-grandfather, Charles Grey, gave the property to the city.

Grey was an avid art collector — one of his paintings once hung on the Evanston Public Library stairwell — and a founding member of the Art Institute of Chicago.

He freely gave his property to the city “in the hopes that it would be an asset to the city’s residents,” Udell said in a letter in support of the project.

“Were Charles alive today I’m sure he’d be delighted that the park was still in existence,” he said, “but perhaps dismayed that it wasn’t getting used to its full advantage.”