Six miles west from the popular North Avenue beach on the lakefront sits Chicago’s only inland beach in Humboldt Park, a hidden respite from the sweltering summer heat.
Behind the field house, the beach currently is empty and the shallow lagoon is dry, not yet refilled with water for the beach season that is less than a couple weeks away.
“It is not scheduled to open now,” Rob Rejman, the Chicago Park District’s director of planning and development, told about 100 residents at an hour-long town hall meeting on Tuesday about the beach’s future.
However, Rejman said the meeting marked the beginning of the process intended to come up with sustainable alternatives to maintaining the manmade swimming beach, located not far from an outdoor pool with a water slide in Humboldt Park.
“It is a manmade beach that needs to have constant water flow to keep it open,” he said. That price tag is about $1 million a year to fill the lagoon and keep it open in the summer, he said. The water goes into the ground and out to the sewers, he said.
Morgan Halstead started an online petition to save the Humboldt Park Beach, garnering more than 1,300 signatures over two months.
“My summer would not be Chicago without this beach here,” she said, adding she takes her two children there every summer.
Although city beaches are set to open on May 22, residents have said the Humboldt Park beach typically has opened a few weeks later in June the past three years.
“We can’t put in any infrastructure to conserve anything in a month so I’d like to take him at his word but I certainly hope that he saw that this community is not going to just let them do that,” she said afterward.
Fellow residents and members of the Humboldt Park Advisory Council voiced frustration and anger and said they were insulted that the park district is bringing the beach up right before summer hits.
“I am thoroughly disappointed and disgusted at the way this decision has been given to us,” Amy Vega, advisory council president, said at the meeting.
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She said the council has asked numerous times whether the beach was in danger of closing. There was plenty of time to involve the council in coming up with a strategic plan to address the beach this year and in the long term, she said.
A community conversation should have happened months ago, said Sherry Daun, 38, who has lived in Humboldt Park for seven years. She said the meeting was merely perfunctory.
“My feeling is they made up their minds that it’s going to close and they made up their minds months ago,” Daun said.
Had the park district told the community last summer that it could really happen, the community could have raised money or worked to find solutions to maintain it, she said.
However, Rejman said it wasn’t a done deal. The next step is to come back and consider potential solutions, he said.
“We need to think about water conservation. We need to think about sustainability. We need to think about the cost of just having an open tap all the time and we want to work with this community through the advisory council to look at what options we can do,” Rejman said after the meeting. “Saving that much money a year is a lot of money we could reinvest in the park, in programs or other features here.”
Such alternatives to the beach could include beach reconfiguration, water play areas with spray elements, wetland or landscape restoration, water conservation projects or storm water management projects.
Without a beach, residents said they will have to cool off with open fire hydrants or travel to the lakefront, the latter of which can be expensive, considering transportation and parking.
“Please find a way, a solution so we can have our beach stay put in Humboldt Park because we all need it,” said resident Gloria Burgos.