recipe for fixin' a TASTY CHICAGO BROWNFIELD!

(take this...)


"What became known as Stearns Quarry opened sometime in the late 1830s and supplied lime and crushed stone for concrete, fertilizer, and roads until it closed in 1970, at a final depth of 350 feet below street level. The City of Chicago bought the giant hole in 1970 for 9 million dollars to use as a dump for construction and demolition debris (CDD) and for ash from the Northwest incinerator on the West Side which burned Chicago’s garbage for 26 years. Incinerator ash stopped being accepted in 1987, but CDD continued to come in, much of it made, of course, of lime and crushed stone, in shapes"


(add this...)


"The Chicago Park District is now reconstituting the site as an unprecedented type of urban park, with dramatic topography, a fishing hole, a sledding hill, a “natural” amphitheater, and an elaborately engineered water management system. This system includes an underground pump to remove existing leachate draining toxins from the buried incinerator ash, and an overground sequence of ponds that collect and filter surface rainwater and prevent it from contributing to the leachate below."


(get... this?)


looks different, huh?. well, go check out the landscape architecture firm behind it: D.I.R.T. Studios (stands for "design investigations reclaiming terrain") THIS PLAN IS BADASS. if you look closely, it contains a large wetland area designated for water filtration, and a pond for fishing as well as rainwater retention. im not sure exactly how i feel about the large hump/spiral in the center (just because it looks SO much like a landfill) but behind barbed wire, anything looks like prison camp. anyway, D.I.R.T. is worth checking out, i am inspired by some of their work around the country, mostly reworking brownfields.

Although the CITY OF CHICAGO claims that the project has been completed for a few years, you can tell by the barbed wire look and vacant construction machines inside the park that it is actually fairly far from it. when it will ACTUALLY be completed remains to be seen, but needless to say, i am happy to have it around the corner from my apartment. here's to making MOUNTAINS out of LANDFILLS!