Things You See at Heritage Green Park, Chicago

Across the street from Old St. Patrick's Church is the small Heritage Green Park, which didn't exist only a few years ago. But Mayor Daley loves to plant trees. A landscape architect I interviewed in the early 2000s complained that the City of Chicago was hogging all the good trees from nurseries in several nearby states.

Heritage Green Park, taking up about a quarter block at the northeast corner of Des Plaines and Adams, was surface parking as recently as three or four years ago. Now it has trees and bushes and benches and footpaths and a cast-iron fence most of the way around its perimeter -- that's another thing that the mayor likes, cast-iron fences. Though not officially considered a dog park, the human and canine population of the near West Side have apparently taken to it in a big way. I saw a handful of dogs walking their humans in the few minutes I was there. The park is probably a smellfest we humans will never fully appreciate.

Near the southwest corner of the park is a statue of a young woman in flowing robes standing on a curious rock. The statue too is fairly new to Chicago, erected in 2007. Two granite stones at some distance from the statue give its name and describe it, one in English and the other in what I guess is Irish Gaelic, but the raised letters on the both stones have already been partly effaced, so I could barely make out the name of the work: Gráinne.

An article published in Galway, Ireland, notes the following: "Gráinne is a tribute to the many thousands who emigrated from Ireland and means Grace in Gaelic. This sculpture symbolises the traditional Gaelic society before it dramatically changed in the 160’s [sic, I think the article means 1600s, though second-century Ireland might have undergone dramatic changes I don't know about] and is inspired by an archaeological finding of a young girl preserved in a peat bog. Prehistoric European sculptures of women were depicted with the left hand raised while those of men used the right hand, thought to be a gesture of blessing. The base of the sculpture is derived from the famous Turoe Stone, a Celtic pagan monument from County Galway, dating from the time of Christ."

So the heritage is Heritage Green Park is about the Irish, not any of the other dozens of ethnicities that came, and still come, to Chicago. From the peat bog to the shores of Lake Michigan. Well, why not; it's still Mr. Daley's town, for now.

This little sign, also near Gráinne, hasn't been worn away by the few seasons since the fall of 2007. The Plumbing Council of Chicagoland might have insisted on something a little more durable than raised lettering on granite, and they got it. There's no problem in reading their plaque. I wish there were a plumbing plaque in Gaelic, too. An Irish online dictionary I found through Google tells me that Gaelic for the plumbing trade is "pluiméireacht."