Daley's Nowhere

Missing from most of the political/racial hysteria about the proposed move of the Chicago Children's Museum to Grant Park is any discussion of what the potential site actually consists of. Lynn Becker provides an welcomed antidote, with a gallery of photos from the relatively bucolic and quite ironically-named Daley Bicentennial Plaza. And his accompanying commentary is dead-on accurate:

Opponents to the museum believe, as did Daniel Burnham, that it is essential to have places of beauty and nature that are not extensions, but antidotes to the congested density and frenzied activity of a great city.

As you will see from these photos, that's the indispensible role that the park at Daley Bicentennial Plaza plays. It is a place of scenic beauty and wide, untrammeled lawns. It is the place where neighborhood families take their kids to play, and people come to read in the sun or sit in quiet contemplation. It's a calm counterpoint to Millennium Park's fizzy, aggressive urban pop on the other side of Columbus Drive.

Count me among those opponents of the museum's move. Not every city park has to be a tourist spectacle on the scale of Millennium Park. Most of them need to just be city parks - Daley Bicentennial Plaza included. Give the place a few upgrades like those Becker mentions, but for heaven's sake don't drop a huge traffic-drawing museum in there. If the Children's Museum truly has to leave Navy Pier, there are any number of appropriate alternatives to exacavating Chicago's Front Lawn.