CHICAGO | Obama Presidential Library

[galleyfox]

Originally Posted by nomarandlee

Yes, I am perhaps being naive or overly idealistic, but someone should be.

Which of those were grandfathered in before protection ordinances?

You are right, they have set a precedent. So I guess the rebuttal to my thesis is to extend more negative precedent in order to be sure to extinguish the possibility of best practice? Maybe restraining from building large semi-private plazas, edifices, and campuses within our parks is not the best practice. Maybe they are the perfect place for them, but that is a different discussion.

My larger point is that there seems to be very little in the way of actual legal or effective protections if we keep abandoning the idea, in effect, that there should be, in fact, hard and fast protections. The reality seems to be that as long as the right amount of money comes rushing in, a big enough elite or benefactor submits their plan, and the right politicians can push through enough legalese and arbitrary wording to bypass the spirit of designated preservation, that we are just maintaining our limited large parks as earmarked for the footprints of X titan of industry or politician.

Well, the public trust doctrine was never intended for the "spirit of designated preservation".

It's meant to protect public ownership and access, which doesn't necessarily have to be in the form of a nature park.

If Chicago wanted to bulldoze a natural beach for a giant nonprofit industrial theme park on the lakefront, that is well within the city's prerogative. That *IS* the origin of Jackson Park after all. Not that the replaced section of Jackson Park was comparable to a natural beach. An open lawn between two major roads of speeding cars is more of a negative space, a nonspace, in my opinion.

The museum building and property still belong to Chicago, and the Obamas are legally leasing an exhibition space. At the end of the lease, Chicago is free to change the exhibition or to keep the existing one like any other lakefront museum.

As for parks being earmarked for elite display. .. that's most of the world's spectacular tourist sites and gardens. Grandeur and ego rarely come from the public.