Ambrose Erkenswick and coach Bryan Cless in Oz Park

Jon Randolph

A Not-So-Level Playing Field

While the Park District signs off on a deal to give Latin School a soccer field on public land, Lincoln Park High players contend with potholes, dogs, and a manhole cover camouflaged by carpet.

September 7, 2007

By Ben Joravsky

On September 6 the Lincoln Park High boys soccer team opened its season at home. Their opponent, Wells High School, was the least of their worries. The potholes and divots that pock their field were a bigger challenge, not to mention the manhole cover covered with a scrap of carpet.

Lincoln Park’s soccer field at Oz Park may be the worst in the city. “Guys are always coming home with twisted ankles,” says Ambrose Erkenswick, a junior on the team. “You think—is this a joke? But no, it’s real.”

All over the city, facing a chronic shortage of fields, public league soccer teams are scrambling for playing space. But what makes Lincoln Park’s situation hard to take for Erkenswick and his teammates is watching as the Park District turns over prime land in Lincoln Park—just down the street from their school—so that the private Latin School can construct its own state-of-the art soccer field.

As I wrote on July 20, the city’s leasing Park District land to Latin, complete with exclusive access and the right to renew after ten years.

Lincoln Park coach Bryan Cless, who grew up in the suburbs and played at Glenbrook North, took his team up to his alma mater for a game last season. He says his players’ jaws dropped when they saw the facilities—four practice fields and a playing field of carefully tended grass, with lights for nighttime play. They were getting a firsthand look at how much better suburbanites take care of their schoolchildren than officials in Chicago do.

Lincoln Park’s damaged turf in Oz Park, a public park just north of the school, between Halsted and Larrabee and Dickens and Webster, is a disgrace. “We always have people just sort of wandering through our games,” says Erkenswick. The team shares it with the football team, softball players, dog walkers, Frisbee throwers, nannies with baby strollers, pot smokers, you name it.

Coach Cless says he’s never seen anything like it. “We got the dogs out there. We’ll have guys coming practicing their golf swings.”

And Lincoln Park doesn’t have any viable alternatives. The field at the old Near North High School (at Larrabee and Evergreen), though owned by the school board, is used by a private soccer league when it’s not used by the public Jones College Prep, which travels from the South Loop to play there. There’s a nice field over at the New City Y, at Halsted and Clybourn, but that land was recently sold and will be developed as yet another shopping center and condo complex.

The proposed soccer field in Lincoln Park would be ideal, and coach Cless would love to have gotten in on the ground floor of planning for it. Unfortunately, like pretty much everyone else in the community, he didn’t hear about it until the deal was signed and reported in the press.

It turned out that for a year or so, Latin School and Park District officials had been quietly negotiating. Under their plan, approved by the Park District board in October, Latin would spend about a million dollars to build a soccer field in the meadow near the bridge that crosses Lake Shore Drive to North Avenue beach. In return, the Park District will put up lights and maintain the field. For the next ten years, Latin will have exclusive use of the field from 3:30 to 7 PM on weekdays September through October and April through May. After ten years Latin has the option to extend the lease for another ten, provided the school helps pay to fix the field’s surface. In other words, Latin gets to use the field when other high school teams would most want to use it. Latin also gets use of the field from 8:30 to 5 every weekday during the month of August, when schools are gearing up for the start of the boys soccer season. Lincoln Park’s kids—like students from all the other high school and grammar schools in the area—can use the field after 7 PM. But Cless says that’s too late for his players to start practice.

There’s a slight chance that community opposition will embarrass Park District superintendent Tim Mitchell into forcing Latin to allow schools like Lincoln Park to share the field. On August 23 more than 150 people showed up during the season’s most dramatic storm for a public meeting to oppose the deal. They railed against the secrecy of the negotiations. They said it was unfair to give a private school so much control over public land. They pointed out that Latin was gaining control of the field by paying up front the fees the Park District would have collected over time if it had built the field on its own.

Vi Daley, alderman of the ward in question, and newly elected 42nd Ward alderman Brendan Reilly, whose ward is just south of the field, said they hadn’t known about the deal until it had been reported publicly and would vote against it if they could. Former 43rd Ward alderman Marty Oberman said that in his opinion the deal requires approval by the Chicago Plan Commission, which means aldermen Reilly and Daley might have the chance to exercise some clout and have it killed. Charlie Steinberg, who lives near Latin, says he’s considering challenging the deal in court. “I’m ready to put in money to file a lawsuit if it comes down to that,” says Steinberg. “It’s something for a judge to decide whether this deal enters the realm of privatizing public land.”

After the meeting, Latin officials said they would consider allowing the public more use of the field. But Park District officials said as far as they were concerned the deal was done.

If they’re right, at this time next year Latin’s kids will be playing along the lakefront in Lincoln Park on one of the best fields money can buy. The Lincoln Park High School kids will be back at Oz, dodging the golf balls and hoping not to mangle their ankles.

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