Open access vs. donors' influence

Soon after a great fire had gutted much of Chicago's lakefront property, city fathers decreed it should be "forever open, clear, and free."

But more than a century later, visitors walking downtown might be a little perplexed by Millennium Park, this summer's addition to the city's lakefront. For on its "open, clear, and free" space sit the Harris Theater, the Pritzker Pavilion, the Crown Fountain, and the SBC Sculpture and Plaza - not to mention the Bank One Promenade, Wrigley Square, and McCormick Tribune Plaza.

It's a startling welcome to a new kind of Logo Land, where public spaces are funded substantially with private money. Although the practice isn't new, it's a trend that's accelerating in the United States and even spreading overseas.

At a time when government funding for parks and other urban spaces is declining, it raises a big question about control over public facilities: Whose park is it, anyway?

So far, the privatization of Chicago's newest park has generated peculiarities but not protests.

For example: A week after Millennium Park's grand opening as a gift to the people of Chicago, the property was closed to visitors while the city prepared the grounds for an invitation-only fundraising event. The event benefited the park, and no other special access has been promised to donors.

Nevertheless, the message is clear, observers say.

"You get what you pay for," says Brent Ryan, codirector of the City Design Center of the University of Illinois at Chicago. "When the private sector pays for public space, you get demands on that space you wouldn't otherwise."

Then there's the bandshell controversy. The futuristic structure swoops and dips wildly and sports bristling metal fins on its roof - "like an exploded Coke can," quips one local author.

That look wasn't the first choice of designer Frank Gehry. "Frank settled on one design, a Miesian scheme, very simple - none of this exuberance," says Edward Uhlir, the park's project manager. But since the $15 million bandshell was being underwritten by local philanthropist Cindy Pritzker, her preference for a design more readily identifiable as a "Gehry" won out, says Mr. Uhlir.

Some proponents defend such control. "The private sector can do what the public can't," says John Bryan, chairman of the fundraising committee for Millennium Park. It can "say: 'Do your masterpiece and don't worry about the cost.' "

Chicago, which gave control of the lakefront acreage to the nonprofit Millennium Park Inc., is not the only city to "sell off" pieces of public land to private philanthropy.

Since the formation of New York's Central Park Conservancy in 1980, groups of private citizens have taken on the task of securing funds to repair and maintain many central city parks, including Forest Park in St. Louis and Piedmont Park in Atlanta.

Many of these fundraising groups have also undertaken responsibility for programming and parks management.

In some cases, the process has gone too far, some experts argue. "If an adjunct fundraising operation comes into existence, that's wonderful, but it needs to follow the plan and the priorities of the [park] agency, with decisions publicly made," says Peter Harnick of the Trust for Public Lands, which urges increased private support for public open space.

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