Lincoln Park 9 Feb 2013 (Mainly trees)

Lincoln Park, Night of 25 August 2012

Three Urban Pilgr-images Part I

Three Tree Pictures - Foster to Lawrence

Previous post in this series: Near Kathy Osterman Beach/Lincoln Park, and Bryn Mawr to Foster for Lincoln Park, Chicago and Custer - Dempster/Chicago - Ridge for Evanston, Illinois

Three Tree Pictures - Evanston: Custer - Dempster/Chicago - Ridge

Three Tree Pictures - Bryn Mawr to Foster

Three Tree Pictures - Near Kathy Osterman Beach/Lincoln Park

Deep Map Assignment

Since I am getting some very strong writing from an undergraduate liberal studies class in response to this exercise I thought I would share it.

The assignment is introduced during a lecture/discussion on the works of Baudelaire, Joyce, deCerteau, William Least Heat-Moon, and Tim Robinson, writers unified by their emphasis on walking, dwelling, eclectic attention, genre-blending and so forth.

Deep Map

In this short essay assignment choose a neighborhood or even a small part of a neighborhood and develop a Deep Map of this area. The objective is to examine this urban location in a highly interdisciplinary way.  It is very important that as you develop your essay that you physically visit the place: the essay to a large extent should draw upon the processes of becoming familiar with the chose location.

A Pedestrian Fragment on Interstitial Ecology

It’s just the way we roll: on our walk today Vassia and I detoured from our habitual walking route and instead of going east towards the lake and then north along the lakeside trail, we went east and south towards Chicago.  No particular reason; sometimes strollers, flâneurs, a pair of peripatetics such as we are, are just called upon to delicately subvert the normal course of things.  Who does the calling?  To whose invitation do we respond? 

We do most of our living in the margins.  Between our workaday world and the wilderness of sleep, a few hours of respite, between the orderly abodes of our little city and the wilderness of the lake, a margin of grass and sand; between the end of one week and resumption of our same old travail, a couple of days to be very mildly wild, and by wild I include the exercise of our animal limbs: we walk. 

We walked along the beach where we could, or marched along the path by the beach and looked out over the grey-green water.  The waves were high and surgent and crashed against the wooden posts driven into the sand.  Groins, I think they call these; wooden groins driven in the sand to calm the lake.  In the crack in our town between the houses and apartments and the lake, are trees and grass and weeds.  In the cracks in the pavements, small weeds grow, no less lovely for being common as the rind of muck they grow in.

On our return we walked across the graveyard.  The dead have no plans.  Between those monuments to the plan-less, geese shat and walked, and honked.

Sneek a Peek at DeepMap Lincoln Park

A Small Sample of the Lincoln Park Tree Map

We are still in the early days of preparing our tree map of Chicago's Lincoln Park  DePaul undergraduates Core Cote, Jake Hartle, and Erin Weber worked on this over the last couple of years.  We have most of the trees in the park mapped, species identified, sized, and the condition evaluated. 

On this map (prepared by DePaul Geography major Alex Ulp) we display just a little taste of a large data set (this shows a fraction of the total tree population mapped). Ultimately, and hopefully before too long, we will complete the map.  I'll be recruiting more students to work on this in Spring.

I'll keep you posted.

A nice little Chicago Tribune piece on our work can be found here.  DePaul covered the story here.