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• 1 2021-01-19T16:48:26-06:00 The Metropolitan Park Report, 1905 16 plain 2023-11-03T10:28:30-05:00 After years of research, the Special Park Commission published its findings in early 1905. The "Metropolitan Park Report" consisted of seven parts:
  1. Historical sketches of recreational spaces in Chicago
  2. Comparisons between Chicago and other American and European cities
  3. Statement of the park problem for Chicagoans
  4. Proposals for the preserve and park system
  5. Proposal for administrative control of the district
  6. Reports from landscape architects and their proposals
  7. Recommendations for park and playground sites in the city
  Perhaps the most striking part of the report was its insistence that the paucity of park space contributed to the moral and physical decline of city residents. The lack of parks, Perkins and Jensen argued, harmed public health. With the population growth rate for the city estimated at more than seven percent annually, they projected that the future population of Chicago and Cook County would rise to somewhere between five and thirteen million by 1952. Reformers needed to work fast to prepare the metropolitan region for future Chicagoans and avoid what Perkins and Jensen feared would be high rates of death and crime.
  
  The "Metropolitan Park Report" included a number of compromises between those who wanted to implement a boulevard system and those who wanted to keep nature as intact as possible. It noted that the area farthest from the city along the Skokie and Des Plaines Rivers offered the greatest opportunity for preservation. Perkins wrote in the report that “Man’s [minor] interference with the forest is visible everywhere, and this has in many instances produced a picturesqueness that has rendered some tracts most beautiful and established a precedent that should be encouraged.” According to Perkins, however, landowners, and especially farmers, had defaced much of the forest. Sounding a note of urgency, he said, ”The bad habit of some owners of annually burning down the undergrowth so they can ‘see through,’ shows its ruinous effect.” He added that the “Severe thinning out of the forest for pasture purposes, especially where oak predominates, has in some instances shown its damaging influences and the once luxuriant forest is gradually dying out.”
  
   
• 1 2021-01-27T12:41:30-06:00 Municipal Science Club and Special Park Commission 8 plain 2023-09-29T14:57:22-05:00 In the 1890s, the Municipal Science Club organized the social, political, and economic elite to promote urban parks, playgrounds, and recreational spaces. Most notably, the club invited Jacob Riis to speak at Hull-House about the dangers of the overcrowded urban environment. This meeting led to the City Council’s creation of the Special Park Commission in 1899, on which many Municipal Science Club members, including Dwight Perkins and Jens Jensen, served. The Commission studied Chicago’s existing open spaces, called for more playgrounds, and worked to create a systematic plan for recreational spaces across the city. It was the Special Parks Commission that published the Metropolitan Park Report in 1905.