Deena Dasein finds
"Don't it always seem to go, That you don't know what you've got till its gone? They paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
The song is oddly suited to this place. Except they didn't put up a parking lot. In this traffic-choked section of Lincoln Park, a parking lot would be paradise. Hell, a legal parking space would be paradise. In reality, they tore down a parking lot. They also eliminated a weedy area dotted with shrubs and trees. And put up a Nature Museum.
With its slabs of bright beige faux-stucco with central areas encased in glass, the Nature Museum sits in the midst of Lincoln Park, at the intersection of Fullerton Parkway and Cannon Drive. It's a heavily traveled area, within spitting distance of the zoo, the Lakefront, Diversey Harbor, a slew of high-rise apartments and the commercial attractions of Clark Street. As real estate, the museum has it all, or at least all three of the really important features: location, location, location. The building is set back from the streets, nestled into a hillock. Long before the advent of high-rises, or civilization, the site had been a sand dune on Lake Michigan's ancient beach. More recently, next to the public parking lot, there'd been a Park District garage built into the hill that, except for its driveway entrance, was barely visible.
A woman whose condo overlooks the museum is favorably impressed by the project. "It's very interesting, really something," she enthuses, declining to give her name. She has one reservation, though: "There's no place to park at the museum. They could have used Monroe Harbor -- there is so much space there and loads of parking." Her neighbor, sharing the same high-rise view, sees things differently. "It's hideous," Merilee Benson says. "I think it is a monstrosity."
How the Nature Museum came to be built here is one of those Chicago-style "let's make a deal" stories. It begins with two venerable institutions feeling pinched for space. The Lincoln Park Zoo got its start in 1869 with a pair of swans, just a few years after the area ceased its cemetery function and divested itself of buried bodies. Having erected new buildings in past decades, the zoo bureaucracy needed structures for a different sort of animal: administrative offices. The Park District, however, thought the zoo had been over-built and refused their request.
South of the zoo, on the park's Clark Street edge where Armitage begins, another organization, the Chicago Academy of Sciences, was also feeling cramped. Robert Kennicott founded the CAS, the city's first museum, in 1857. His collections of the region's plants and animals were twice destroyed by fire, but specimens donated by others rebuilt the holdings, which have been housed in the stately Matthew Laflin Building on Clark since 1893. In recent decades, the CAS modernized its dioramas and expanded its range of activities, especially under Dr. Paul Heltne, its energetic and well-liked president who sought to expand the Laflin Building.
The Park District met the expansionist aspirations of both groups by proposing a swap: If the CAS would give the Laflin Building to the zoo for their administrative offices, they could build a new museum on the site of the park's underused North Shops garage. It was an offer they couldn't refuse and, in 1995, the CAS left their century-old dwelling and expanded in several new directions. Its administrative offices found a permanent home a short distance up Clark Street. The collections of flora and fauna, and the dioramas of the Chicago region's landscapes of a century ago, were carted away to a storage facility. Before they were dismantled, some of the dioramas were digitally captured and can now be viewed in cyberspace, where parking is not a problem. It would have been natural to name the new museum the Chicago Academy of Sciences, or after its founder Kennicott, or even after Dr. Heltne. But with the help of science -- particularly focus groups -- they decided that Nature was a friendlier, more magnetic term. "We use nature to teach science," Lisa Noland, CAS' Director of Public Affairs says during a tour of the very unfinished museum about five weeks before its October 23 opening. Its full name is the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. Richard Notebaert, CEO of Ameritech and husband of the chairwoman of CAS' fund-raising campaign, donated $4 million to the project in his wife's name. Sections of the museum are named for other corporate donors, many with family connections to members of CAS' board. If money buys names, the new institution should be called the Chicago Nature Museum, as the city's taxpayers, through the Chicago Park District, ponied up almost half the cost of the $30 million project.
The original design for the museum was met with opposition from Friends of the Park, according to its long-time leader Erma Tranter. They won some concessions, including lowering the structure's height to treetop level, "at least in the summer" Tranter says. They also objected to the proposed asphalt paths and succeeded in having them done in fieldstone. FOP were not able to do anything about the museum's synthetic-stucco outer walls, which were designed to look like a sand dune and would seem to be a perfect surface for the urban wildlife that are graffiti artists.
The exhibits in the Nature Museum are designed to teach nature in a fun, gee-whiz, hands-on sort of way. You walk though a round entrance built into a wall of falling water to enter the Water Lab, where you find a giant water-filled sandbox that demonstrates the process of erosion for those with short attention spans. You can also test the water quality of a sample brought from home or from the neighboring pond just outside.
The underground exhibit is especially kid-friendly. Children can walk or crawl through prairie-dog tunnels and a beaver lodge and touch fabricated Disneyesque inhabitants. Nearby is a house built to scale, but cut away to display its nature-culture interface with the outdoors. We can see its sewer and water system and numerous creepy (but dead and thus not crawling) cockroaches and spiders.
New dioramas were commissioned to recreate the prairie, woodland and lakeshore habitats that were part of the neighborhood before civilization erased them. Working on installing them was Gary Brees -- a man who knows nature tooth and claw, in a manner of speaking. He killed the deer with a bow and arrow, and shot the not-yet delivered buffalo with a rifle. He proudly displays the plants, realistically created with holes on leaves, where insects might have nibbled on them. The glassless dioramas, with painted mural backgrounds and life-like fauna and flora, are set in pairs separated by a thin path. Walking between them gives the feeling that you are there - virtual reality of a non-digital kind.
Sure to be a popular exhibit is the Butterfly Haven, completed for a spring 1999 fund-raising ball. Monarchs, Painted Ladies, Black Swallowtails, Red Admirals and Pearl Crescents flit about in the 28-foot-tall glass enclosed room. They stop at brightly colored flowers and sip nectar from feeding stations of ripe fruit. The butterfly guy, Doug Taron, Curator of Biology, hopes eventually to have about twenty species indigenous to the Midwest. Whoever said butterflies are free didn't reckon with the more than 75,000 cubic feet of air that must be kept at 80 degrees year round, as well as constantly misted. When you exit the haven, you can see Taron's breeding laboratory and check out the butterflies-in-waiting chrysalises.
Further down the hall are posters depicting caterpillar habitats and food supply, and an invitation to "pull the lever to smell the scent of a Swallowtail caterpillar."
Outside, facing Fullerton, is a butterfly garden, planted with flowers designed to attract the insects, at least for a few weeks of the year. Indeed, the area surrounding the faux-stucco building is an integral part of the museum experience, signaled by a swath of Wisconsin fieldstone that runs from the front path though the lobby out to the Ravine Garden and wends its way to the pond. Visitors are invited to view the landscaped outdoors through glass, from the bird-walk and patios, and more up-close and personal by walking along the wood-chip footpath.
Small signs explain that the landscaping is "Planted with grasses and shrubs that provide food and shelter for Lincoln Park's wildlife. Look carefully -- some residents have already moved in." Indeed they have. Traversing one of the paths leading toward the pond just north of the building reveals traces of wildlife of a different sort -- an empty bottle of cheap wine, a crumpled white T-shirt, three Corona Extra empties and four spent condoms, plus packaging. Like the museum itself, the pond has not been left to the forces of nature. The Park District, in response to the new Museum, began a $1 million rehabilitation project that seemed like an assault on nature itself. For starters, the carp had to go. Their bottom-feeding habits muddied the water, depriving pond plants of sunlight. In March they were eliminated when a chemical, which paralyzed their gills, was added to the water. Up on the northern end a lighted fountain was installed. Reportedly it was Mayor Daley's idea, because he likes to eat at the café there. Aside from the annoying noise, the fountain, which had cost more than $10,000, stirred up the pond sediment, something the carp did for free. When asked about the fountain, the new head of the CAS, Lew Crampton, told Inside Lincoln Park: "It doesn't really affect us. It's so far up the other end."
Crampton's response was both politically astute and ecologically ignorant, as befits his background. His prior work experience, in the political-technology corporate complex, is well suited to his new job. He began the current decade in the EPA's office of Communications and Public Affairs. There he personally dealt with protesters against an Ohio hazardous waste incinerator, ordering the police to arrest them. As do many who work as government regulators, Crampton went through that magic revolving door to take a job with Waste Management Inc. as Senior VP of Communication and Government Relations.
Down on the pond's south end, abutting the Nature Museum, was something that did affect things -- the casting pier. This 75-year-old cross of 16-inch-thick concrete had been the site of fly-casting championships in the post-World War II era and was still used for fishing. Despite its perfect condition, Crampton wanted the huge 120-foot by 150-foot structure removed. But protesters, as well as the small fortune it would take to get rid of the pier or replace it "up the other end," scuttled that plan.
The pier was saved but the pond rehabilitation nearly did in the ducks. Dead and dying early in the summer, the ducks were not intentionally poisoned. In late summer a female Mallard swam with her head down in the water. Though it seemed she was simply gobbling up goodies in the slimy water, she was down so long it was obvious something was wrong. Her tail feathers were not pointed skyward, as usual. A few days later there was a news story about the botulism (clostridium botulinum) that first attacks the fowl's neck muscles. Unable to lift their heads out of the water, they drown. Many died, others recovered, but only with community help. Daphne, the white domestic duck (by way of China) that is a year-round resident, was saved when neighbors brought her to a veterinarian. Frantic calls to the Park Department revealed the problem in the dredging of the pond that was then used to fill in the shore area. Pumping in fresh water saved the day and the ducks are now fat and sassy.
The pond now sports wrought iron fencing around its perimeter and a coir facine (rolled coconut fiber) reinforced shoreline. The killing is now left to feathered creatures; in early September a lone green heron was spotted standing on a log, greedily feeding on something or other in the north end of the pond. Chicago is full of man-made nature, from the Zoo Rookery, a 1-acre oasis for migrating fowl directly across the street from the museum, to the zoo and the Shedd Aquarium. And there are other unlabeled nature exhibits -- our bathroom mirrors let us look at the most dangerous threat to the planet's ecological well being.
Nature has always been man-made; it is, after all, an abstract term whose meaning shifts over time. The nature exhibited in Chicago's Nature Museum certainly bears human thumbprints as much as the term itself. Nature is shown here freeze-dried (the cockroaches and spiders in the house exhibit), killed and stuffed (in the dioramas), and served up as impressions for wax molds of insect-nibbled prairie plants or as models for the larger-than-life soft-sculptured beavers. The live ants in the prairie dog tunnels are enclosed in glass, and we probably won't hear any cries of "Free Willy," or "Free Z" for them. The live butterflies freely flitting around in the haven are prevented from migrating and kept innocent of the elements. We don't want our nature raw, but, as Claude Levi-Strauss once wrote, long before the advent of the Rainforest Café -- cooked.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.