Natural Areas and Missile Bases
Not all battles are won, but many are worth fighting for.
I’m working up a “walking tour” post of sites to see in Jackson Park, now that folks might be visiting the Obama Presidential Center. There are many other things to see! They are all sites I’ve written up except this one—Bobolink Meadow Nature Area, which rests on top of the remains of Missile Base C41, a relic of the Cold War. I hadn’t written about it because there is a very thorough site that talks all about the Jackson Park base and all the missile bases that ringed Chicago, but I can add in the reaction of folks in Hyde Park.
Jackson Park, part of a major migratory bird flyway, is a place where now one can experience a small taste of the original Great Lakes ecosystem. Much of that ecosystem had to be reconstructed though as the Chicago Park District didn’t really value “weeds” for a long time.
Wooded Island of course was preserved by Frederick Law Olmsted for his design for the 1893 World’s Fair. It was supposed to be a respite from the extremely artificial 1893 World’s Fair and visitors recognized and appreciated it. He isolated an oak sand ridge, made it an island surrounded by the lagoon he created, and preserved a microbiome in the soil that is thousands of years old. Some of the bur oaks on the island witnessed the fair and one may be 300 years old. Wooded Island is now known as the Paul Douglas Nature Preserve. There are four official natural areas in the park. In addition, there is a recreation of the shore’s original sand dunes at 63rd Street Beach. Hyde Park Disc Golf has just created the Wacker Woods Natural Area surrounding the 18-hole Disc Golf course. The fourth official natural area is Bobolink Meadow.
Beyond the official natural areas, which have volunteer stewards and teams supporting them, other areas of the park were redone during the 2014 Great Lakes Fisheries and Ecosystem Restoration (GLFER) project.1
As a brief recap, Jackson Park was created as part of the South Parks Commission, which was a separate taxing entity that argued that parks were the lungs of the city. They hired Olmsted and Vaux to draw up a plan for three parks joined by water (Washington Park, Midway Plaisance, and Jackson Park). The commission hired Burnham and Root to design facilities like the Darrow Bridge in Jackson Park and the stables and refractory in Washington Park. Then in 1890, the board of the World’s Columbian Exposition, on the advice of Olmsted and Burnham, chose Jackson Park and the Midway for the fair in 1893, with the promise that the park would be fully landscaped after the fair, paid for by the fair. Olmsted Sons returned in 1895 to develop a new plan. It was a radical redesign, though Wooded Island remained as the only undisturbed area in the park. With the special taxing district and major investment, the athletic facilities and gardens in Jackson Park became a tourist destination for decades. The area where Bobolink Meadow and the golf driving range now stand were three large lawn tennis courts.
In 1934, the Chicago Park District was created to consolidate hundreds of small city-owned parks and the three commissions (South, West, and Lincoln Park) that had been investing in their parks with separate taxes. In part, a goal was getting access to Federal money during the Depression. A number of Jackson Park features were created with WPA money.2 This was followed by neglect during World War II. After World War II, the story was disinvestment on the South Side. On top of that there is the on-going attitude that park land is empty land better used for other purposes.
During the Korean War and the Red Scare, the U.S. military felt that all U.S. cities were vulnerable to nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Missiles didn’t yet have a long range, but they could be fired from ships off the coasts or from long-range bombers. Their answer was to create “supersonic rings of steel”3around large cities. The Nike missile was a short-range ground to air missile designed to shoot down an in-coming attack. One summer I gave Friends of the White City tours in Jackson Park and mentioned the Nike missile base, only to have a puzzled young couple ask me why a shoe company had missiles. Both thought Nike, the Greek goddess of victory, would be a good name.
The bases were located in Montrose/Belmont, Burnham Park, Jackson Park, Wolf Lake, Homewood, Palos Heights, Orland Park, Argonne National Laboratory, Naperville, Addison, Arlington Heights, Palatine, Mundelein, Skokie, Libertyville, and Fort Sheridan in Illinois. In Indiana they were in Porter, Gary, Munster, and Hobart.
Each installation had two locations. One location was the Integrated Fire Control area that had radar towers and personnel buildings. It was there to detect in-coming missiles and guide the out-going missiles. The second location was the Launcher Area, which involved a complex of structures including underground bunkers where the missiles were stored horizontally.
Elevators brought the missiles to the surface, where they were pushed on steel rails to the launchers.
Nike Ajax missiles had a range of 30 miles. Nike Hercules missiles, which were installed in 1959, could carry nuclear warheads and could attack supersonic targets 90 miles away. But with the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles in 1957, both kinds were obsolete by 1959. ICBMs traveled 3,000 miles at supersonic speeds, with steep curves to their trajectories. The radar couldn’t lock beams on the ICBMs. But the bases were “permanent” and the military industrial complex President Eisenhower warned about4 was making a lot of money. They were very hard to dislodge.5
The military’s first choice in 1954 was to destroy Wooded Island for the Launcher Area.6 The park district offered no resistance, but local citizens and especially the bird watchers raised a huge outcry. The Hyde Park/Kenwood Community Conference but also the University of Chicago through the Southeast Chicago Commission (its political wing during urban renewal) all protested. U.S. Senator (and Hyde Parker) Paul Douglas put pressure on in Washington, D.C. as did Hyde Park’s U.S. Representative Barratt O’Hara. The Army agreed to move the launcher area across the lagoon to the former location of the lawn tennis courts. It was unfortunate that the Park District compensated the loss of park land by filling in the interconnected lagoons, thereby cutting off the healthy flow of water from the 59th Street inlet through to Jackson Park Harbor. It also eliminated the boating that was once a large part of Jackson Park recreation.
Then the Army, unannounced, signed a contract with the Park District and seized a big slice of Promontory Point7 for the radar installation. It was billed as a permanent loss but the lease was limited. They surrounded the area with an 8-foot-high chain link fence topped with barbed wire and built a steel radio mast and 3 radar towers. One tower was for searching for a target, the second tower was to lock onto the target and to relay the information on its course and speed to the primitive 1955 computer. The third radar tower was the missile tracking radar for guiding the Nike.8
Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov came to Chicago for a pleasant visit in June 1955 and praised the beauty of the lakefront and wondered why it wasn’t maintained better. If he read the newspapers, he knew it was being grabbed by the Army. On June 29, 1955, 500 people protested the Point takeover. They already knew that Nike missiles posed a safety hazard. One in Maryland had “escaped” and exploded in April 1955.9 The main speaker was Representative O’Hara, who protested the “groundless fear of war.” Maynard Krueger, associate professor of economics, came dressed as Davy Crocket (then a popular Disney show with a famous theme song). He sang:
Our young’uns have to have a place where they can rip and roar
For climbin’ trees and shootin’ b’ars and wadin’ long the shore
Which, if you are as old as I am, immediately started playing in my head.10 The protestors and O’Hara called for the long-planned island in the lake for the radar installation. The Army said that they couldn’t ask the rest of the country to pay to improve the shore of Chicago (a message that sure changed over the years as the Army Corps of Engineers has imposed the hated concrete along the lake). O’Hara pointed out that his district alone paid more federal taxes than five Southern states. The Army cut down every tree and shrub between Promontory Point and the former lawn tennis courts, supposedly to create a line of sight. Park users were heart broken.
I found it interesting that the Defender saw the story as a different one for the Black community. In 1955, the Defender celebrated the servicemen working on missile systems. Later, it pointed to careers in missile technology as opportunities. There were, after all, billions of 1950s dollars being pumped into the contractors. Indeed, the newspapers were loaded with help wanted ads for men to work on designing and building missiles. There were also thousands of servicemen stationed in Hyde Park between the 5th Army Headquarters and the Nike installation.
Overall, the Chicago Park District leased 88 acres to the Army. At 63rd Street, the Army erected a 2-story concrete block building for personnel. North of 44th Street there was a series of shanties. At 28th Street more concrete block buildings. All fenced off and patrolled by armed guards. The Suburbanite Economist was incensed at the loss of access to the lake and the trashing of the lakeshore, running a series of blistering editorials.
The Army turned to public relations, creating an exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry, parading a Nike Ajax missile in the Bud Billiken Parade, and replacing the tank outside the 5th Army Headquarters on 51st Street with a missile.
In 1958, concerns multiplied when eight Nike Ajax missiles exploded on a base in Middletown, New Jersey, killing three soldiers, including a serviceman from Englewood. The Army started to close down some of the sites, but they kept the one in Jackson Park. Instead of closing it down, they brought in Nike Hercules missiles, which were capable of carrying nuclear warheads (no one knew if they had them in Jackson Park).
In 1960, they even expanded their area on Promontory Point to add another radar tower. In 1965, they added a new 150-foot microwave tower. Hyde Park’s great independent alderman Leon Despres declared the whole thing propaganda. They knew they didn’t contribute to defense. They wanted to keep the public worried so the public would support military budgets. Representative Abner Mikva wanted to know who they thought they were protecting Hyde Park from, Indiana?
Finally, in 1971, with the leases running out, with the undeniable fact that the bases were obsolete, and with the Vietnam War protests, the Army agreed to relinquish the land. They removed the installations and returned control to the park district, which was left with the task of removing the installations. There is often a question asked about what might be underground. In 2002, apparently ground penetrating radar detected “anomalies.” Apparently, something was leaking but supposedly it’s all fine.
The launcher site became tall grass in a quiet backwater of the park. Jackson Park is of course a major flyway for migrating birds. Recognition that natural areas were a good idea crept into the conversation in 1977 when Wooded Island was named the Paul Douglas Natural Area after its great defender. Doug Anderson led his famous bird walks for the Audubon Society through Jackson Park every week. In the old Launcher site, a broken water main had created a perfect grassy marshland for bobolinks, which migrate from Argentina. Bobolinks are rare in Chicago and their numbers are declining in Illinois from habitat loss. The area gained the informal name of Bobolink Meadow.
The avid birdwatchers were thrilled—until 1978 when the Park District announced that it had already let contracts for a golf driving range that would eliminate more than half of the meadow. When the bird watchers protested, the Park District shrugged. Birds weren’t their problem. Even Julian Levi, notorious head of the Chicago Plan Commission, was incensed that his commission had been bypassed.
The Park District installed the 12-foot tall fencing around the range that’s there still. About 3 acres of prairie and 2 acres of woodland were left. The bobolinks disappeared. In 1988, the Park District agreed to designate the remaining acres as the Bobolink Meadow Natural Area. It’s been maintained by volunteers and dedicated stewards ever since.
Several natural areas came out of the Nike missile project. The most famous is the Montrose Point Bird Sanctuary. When Nike base C03 was there, the Army screened the base by planting rows of honeysuckle bushes. After the Army left in 1965, birders started calling them the “Magic Hedge” because it attracted birds. Mayor Richard M. Daley (Daley the Second) designated it as an official sanctuary and had it planted in native plants. The Nike base at Wolf Lake is also a conservation area. It wasn’t completely cleaned up, so there are still Nike remnants to see and a missile on display.
By the way, things to see in Jackson Park will be on the Hyde Park Trivia Contest on June 27.
A detailed description of the project and the historical research to align it with the Olmsted plans: “Entangled Culture and Nature: Toward a Sustainable Jackson Park in the Twenty-First Century,” Patricia Marie O’Donnell, Gregory Wade De Vries. Change Over Time, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 2015, pp. 248-265 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press
In particular, the stonework that was the circle of the Perennial Garden (now the Women’s Garden inside the Obama Presidential Center grounds and some of the very large stones in the Japanese Garden.
I haven’t read this yet, but it featured in the WBEZ interview. https://cdsg.org/product/rings-of-supersonic-steel-third-edition/
My trail for this post mostly runs through articles in the Chicago Tribune, the Hyde Park Herald, the Daily Worker, the Chicago Defender, the Suburbanite Economist, and the Daily Herald.
Nice visual history of the Point along with images of the radar installation: https://www.pbs.org/video/the-surprising-history-of-promontory-point-phrwzv/
I haven’t been able to find this video anywhere but on Twitter of the Point in 1966
/video/1
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1955/04/15/91359422.html?pageNumber=1
Daily Worker, July 18, 1955