News
Join us to celebrate Ping Tom Memorial Park’s 25th Anniversary on Saturday, June 1st from 12 to 3 p.m..
ABC7’s Eric Horng interviewed Ernie Wong (the park’s landscape architect), Darryl Tom (son of Ping Tom) and Debbie Liu (PAC President). The theme for the celebration is "What can be accomplished when a community works together"
Wendella is restarting its daily water taxi service to Ping Tom Park. You can get on the water taxi at either the Michigan Avenue or Ogilvie Station stop for a memorable ride to Ping Tom Park. For more information: https://www.chicagowatertaxi.com/Chicago-River-Boat-Stops/Chinatown/
The Chicago Sun-Times wrote an article on the restarting the water taxi here.
祖籍在開平 hometown from Kai Ping
諒兒多才情 Leonard was multitalented
體驗民間苦 he experienced the community’s hardship
育群成眾志 and educated people to unite for goals
館慶賀十年 now celebrating 10 years of the Fieldhouse
With the first character of each line in the Chinese poem making the name of the Fieldhouse: 祖諒體育館.
On Saturday, October 21, 2023 the Ping Tom Memorial Park Advisory Council celebrated the 10th Anniversary of the opening of the Leonard M. Louie Fieldhouse with a Fall Festival and Trunk N Treat event.
The event began with traditional Lion Dance performances by the Haines School Lion Dancers as well as the Dragon Athletic Association. The event was attended by an estimated 400 plus, including children, community leaders, numerous volunteers, local politicians and the Chicago Park District Staff. The celebration included remarks from Jim Mark (who led the field house’s construction and is the nephew of the late Leonard Louie), remarks from Ernest Wong of sitedesign group (which designed the park’s landscape), the reading of a Chinese poem written for the occasion by Anita Luk and a Halloween story read by a member of Shakespeare in the Parks. 12th District State Senator Celina Villanueva, 24th District State Representative Theresa Mah, Cook County Commissioner John Daley and 11th Ward Alderman Nicole Lee attended the celebration. After the ceremony, the Pui Ying Art School coordinated pumpkin and gourd painting and kids enjoyed candies distributed at the Trunk N Treat.
The field house was named after Leonard Louie in recognition of his 50 years of advocating for a fieldhouse in Chinatown to replaced Hardin Square Park that was lost due to the construction of the Dan Ryan / Stevenson Expressway extensions back in the late 1960's.
REI’s reopening of kayak rental and the boathouse at Ping Tom Memorial Park, after three years of closure, gave a chance to explore the unique Chicago park from land and the South Branch of the Chicago River.
Axios reporter Monica Eng spends a day in Chinatown renting kayaks at Ping Tom Park and recommends five spots to have a bite to eat.
With its bright orange pagoda and lush greenery grazing the edge of the Chicago River, Ping Tom Park is a small but mighty green space that has become a cultural destination in the city.
“It is a focal point of pride in the community,” said George Lee, chair of the Ping Tom Park Advisory Council.
https://interactive.wttw.com/playlist/2020/05/07/ping-tom-park
Geoffrey Baer continues his WTTW series on Chicago with Chicago By ‘L’. The Chinatown segment highlights Ping Tom Park, shops and restaurants, and Pui Tak Center. Baer says, “Chinatown’s pride and joy is Ping Tom Park. It’s one of my favorite places in Chicago. This lovely, Asian themed landscape brought much-needed open space to Chinatown and pioneered the transformation of the Chicago River.”
Nobody calls the near West Side of Chicago “Jew Town” anymore. The great-grandchildren of the merchants who sold ... well, just about everything ... at the sprawling open-air market on Maxwell Street have scattered — to Rogers Park, then Skokie, then everywhere.
Many of the city’s old ethnic enclaves were were shattered by supposed “progress,” whether the Italian community on Taylor Street, bulldozed by the expanding University of Illinois at Chicago, or the heart of Bronzeville, cut out by CHA high rises.
Chinatown is an exception. Not only has it preserved its ethnic character — 90 percent of the neighborhood’s residents are Asian, most speaking Chinese at home — but it’s growing, despite, and in some cases because of, setbacks it suffered.
“Chicago’s Chinatown is really interesting,” said David Wu, executive director of the Pui Tak Center, a community center in Chinatown. “Philadelphia and New York, Washington D.C. and Boston — every Chinatown is within blocks of the financial district and City Hall, and every one of these cities would say their Chinatowns are dying.”
Chicago’s Chinatown was originally jammed into two blocks of Clark Street in the Loop. But in 1912, rising rents and white hostility prodded the Chinese community to move, wholesale, to Wentworth and Cermak.
Bad then, good now.
“If we were at Clark and Van Buren and wanted to expand at all, we couldn’t,” said Wu. “A hundred years ago, it wasn’t nice to be pushed out of your community. But now Chicago’s Chinatown is the only one flourishing. It’s more like a normal community, without huge pressures of gentrification.” One way the community maintains cohesion is by idiosyncratic real estate practices.
“If you walk around Chinatown, people advertise their apartment openings on light poles, in Chinese,” said Wu. “I don’t think they’ve intentionally trying to keep people out. This is just how they’ve always done it.”
Thus the Asian population of San Francisco’s Chinatown — America’s oldest — dropped almost 20 percent from 2000 to 2010, according to U.S. Census figures, while the Asian population of Chicago’s Chinatown grew 30 percent in the same period.
Several factors spur immigration to Chicago, such as: universities here welcome Chinese students.
“School administrations want Chinese students because they’re paying full tuition,” said Darryl Tom, an attorney and son of community leader Ping Tom — Chinatown’s park is named in his honor. “People who grew up here embrace the influx of Chinese.”
Development also caused problems in Chinatown’s current location. The Stevenson Expressway obliterated its main green space, Hardin Square Park, in 1963.
“Everyone who grew up in Chinatown in the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s and ’90s remembers their park was the sidewalk,” said Wu.
A new park, Tom Ping Memorial Park, was created in 1998 on the east bank of the Chicago River.
Chinatown residents were dubious about putting a park there. Landscape architect Ernie Wong, who designed the park, remembers “a feng shui master came out, and said this is the worst site for a park. Turned away from the river, facing the railroad tracks.”
So Wong graded the river’s edge, lowering it, using the earth to create a berm, hiding the tracks.
“You want to have a park experience where you are able to actually get to the water,” Wong said.
Chinatown’s riverside park is thought to have proved a model for the successful Riverwalk downtown. It showed “the river has possibilities,” Wu said.
A new library opened in 2015, after the community fought for it.
“In the last 10 years, we’ve been trying to push a little more,” said Wu. “We’re not going to protest at City Hall. But we held community meetings. We forced [former 25th Ward] Alderman [Danny] Solis to commit to building a new library. That’s probably the loudest the community has gotten.”
Saturday, the community celebrates the 20th anniversary of the park and the 40th anniversary of the Friends of the Chicago River.
“Not too many neighborhoods celebrate their parks,” said Wu. “For Chinatown, the park is more than green space. More than a fieldhouse. It’s a symbol of something the community lost and had to work hard to get back.”
In the August 2019 issue, Chicago Magazine writes: Hidden beneath an underpass in this riverside park is a blue, white, and gold floral tableau — striking even in a city full of colorful murals — inspired by chinoiserie and created by artists Andy Bellomo, Chester Chow, and Anna Murphy. 300 W. 19th St., Chinatown, chicagoparkdistrict.com
Fieldhouse stories wrote up a nice article about a winter’s day at the Leonard Louie Fieldhouse.
“Here we are in the heart of Chinatown, but this building is filled with all people Chicago. The diversity is hard to miss. The warmth and genuine kind spirit of the place really shines through.”
Metropolitan Planning Council's blog on some new public art along the Chicago, Calumet and Des Plaines rivers including the mural at Ping Tom Park.
CBS2 News coverage of the Ping Tom Park mural dedication on July 28, 2018.
An Metropolitan Planning Council blog post about the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community's grant from the Chicago Community Trust's Our Great Rivers Initiative which is partially funding the mural under 18th Street Bridge.
