Parks and Recreation
Blue Islanders have enjoyed a system of parks since 1912 when the park district (which was formed in 1909) acquired the property of the late Benjamin Sanders, who was Blue Island's first village president when the town incorporated in 1872 and served as the chairman of the building committee of the Cook County Board after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The 9-acre (36,000 m2) property, which is bounded by Gregory Street, Union Street, Irving Avenue and York Street, came with Sanders' home, which was remodeled into a field house and provided living quarters for the park's superintendent. Central Park eventually offered tennis courts, playground equipment, and the community's first swimming pool. It was vacated by the park district in 1965 when St. Francis Hospital acquired the property for $325,000. (about $2.15 million in 2008) to build its east campus there.
Memorial Park, the city's next public park, was dedicated on Decoration Day (now Memorial Day), 1922 in ceremonies that were presided over by Brigadier General Abel Davis of Glencoe, Illinois, who was Commander of the 132nd Infantry during World War I. The section of Memorial Park running adjacent to Burr Oak Ave. with 330 feet (100 m) of frontage on Highland Ave. had originally been laid out as a cemetery in the early 1850s, when this section of Blue Island was a healthy walk from the settled section of the town. Although the cemetery was added to and improved in subsequent years, it was closed by village ordinance in 1898, and almost all of the bodies that were interred there were moved to Mt. Greenwood Cemetery in Chicago, which had been developed by citizens from Blue Island. The acquisition of the entire parcel bounded by Burr Oak Ave., Highland Ave., Walnut St. and the B & O tracks was completed by the park district in 1935. The park at that point had reached its present size of 10 acres (40,000 m2), and eventually, with the help of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Alphabet agencies, it was provided with landscaping and acquired an outdoor swimming pool, playground equipment, and a handsome Art Deco stadium that seated 1000 persons (The stadium was demolished in December, 2009). With the closing of Central Park, Memorial Park has become the flagship of the Blue Island park system.
The 8.5-acre (34,000 m2) site of Centennial Park at Vermont St. and Division St. on the east side was acquired from the East Side Development Association in 1935 for $11,500 (about $176,300 in 2008). This park provides a field house, convenient athletic fields and playground equipment for the East Side community.
The city operates the Meadows Golf Club, a 6,549-yard (5,988 m), 18-hole golf course that was designed by J. Porter Gibson ASGCA and opened in 1994. It has a course rating of 71.3 and a slope rating of 121.
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Famous quotes containing the words parks and, parks and/or recreation:
“Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor—because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them.”
—Angela Davis (b. 1944)