Conscious Choice: Roots

January 2007 | From the Editor

Roots

It may surprise you to learn that my green pedigree goes back at least a century in this fair city of ours, to the early 1900s when my great-grandfather, Eden Brekke, was a rising Alderman and Committeeman for the 37th Ward, and the Commissioner of the West Chicago Park District, under the infamously corrupt William Hale “Big Bill” Thompson, chief political lickspittle to one Alphonse Capone.

As Park Commissioner, my great-grandfather worked with the internationally renowned landscape architect Jens Jensen and his associates to build a number of smaller West Side parks including Austin, Davis, LaFollette, and Riis in the 37th Ward. Jensen championed the conviction that people must have some contact with the “living green”—flowers and plants native to their home. To Jensen, landscape architecture expressed his near-mystical belief in the renewing and civilizing powers of nature.

Jensen—another Scandinavian—inspired in my great-grandfather and-grandmother a profound love and appreciation for the transformative power of the natural environment. Largely because of the ideas and philosophies of Jensen, which were driven by the urban realities of the day, “Nanny & Pops” bought a summer home on Fox Lake in the Chain-o-Lakes region of Northeast Illinois, where my father and his extended family spent much of his childhood.

In those days, and throughout the 20th Century, the city was a place you tried to get away from. The fortunate, like my father’s family, escaped to the country at will, while the unfortunate, like my mother’s poor Sicilian family living in what is now Old Town, were left to deal with the crime and the grime. Eventually, my mother’s family moved out of the city to neighboring Antioch. In a funny twist of irony, she met my father at a dance on the shores of Fox Lake, and married soon thereafter. A generation later, the paradigm has flipped itself as people are pouring back into the city because it is now the place to be.

My great-grandfather’s lifelong attachment to Urbs in Horto transcended politics, and transmuted itself across time into me. I only hope I can honor his legacy in the years ahead.

— Charles Shaw

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