With A Day in Our Village looming Sunday, I’m revisiting my column from 2010. You can also find it in my book, “Our Town Oak Park: Walk with Me in Search of True Community”:
Passing the tents in Scoville Park, on this Day in Our Village, the word that fits is “adjacency.” In a landlocked town like ours, everything is “next to” everything else. Elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, you can’t separate or segregate. Isolating is when the problems start — and when they start to fester.
Adjacency leads to connection. Scoville Park is adjacent to our eye-catching public library, directly west. To the north, the park is adjacent to First Baptist Church with its large stained glass window that includes Jesus, but also Abraham Lincoln and George Washington Carver. To the east is the former Oak Park Club, now private condos, but once upon a time a “country club.” It may have been exclusive, but it was right in the middle of town — next to everything.
To the south is the modernist, prairie-style Masonic building, now known as “Scoville Square,” across from the very old-world looking, orange-brick, stair-step building modeled on the town hall (Rothaus) in Frankfort, Germany. Old World meets New World at a single intersection.
The crossroads of Lake Street and Oak Park Avenue is the community “epicenter,” where an informal pedestrian parade takes place on beautiful weekend days, such as this first Sunday in June, perfumed by linden and catalpa blossoms, all observable from the large picture windows of the bakery/coffeeshop that affords the best view of the gathering space across the avenue.
From the stools that line these “windows to the world,” you can sip a cup of tea or coffee and study Oak Park’s “adjacency” in the sloping village green of Scoville Park, topped by the Peace Triumphant World War I monument, fronted by the Horse Fountain, which anchors the brick entry plaza where commuters, students and sundry passersby stop to rest on benches and schmooze.
Once the private estate of early settler James Scoville, this natural, high-ground ridge afforded a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. When his descendants were ready to move on, did they sell the property to some ambitious developer, looking to make a killing on the real estate market? No, they deeded it to the village for a park and, a century hence, during the annual Day in Our Village celebration, we can appreciate their foresight. If you need a refresher on our local history, stop by the Historical Society booth and find out why “Scoville Institute” is engraved near the entry of the adjacent library (which James Scoville established as Oak Park’s first library on that spot, abutting his estate).
A Day in Our Village is an “expo” of local organizations, their booths crammed next to one another, so that residents, non-residents and prospective residents can amble by and sample all this village has to offer. And it offers a lot. Walking along the Oak Park Avenue sidewalk this Sunday, you can see Friends of Oak Park Dogs next to the 19th Century Club, next to the Pleasant Home Foundation, next to the Secular Jewish Community and School, next to the West Suburban Special Recreation Association, next to West Suburban Temple Har Zion, next to the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and on and on.
From my perch across the street, you can see many shades of skin, young and old, new parents and empty-nesters, stroller-pushers and dog-walkers, coffee-sippers and water-guzzlers, the fancy and the plain, the fit and the round (and every body in between), shade-lovers and sun-worshippers, Sox fans and Cub fans, liberals and conservatives and libertarians, rich and poor and what’s left of the middle class, nicotine addicts and caffeine addicts and sugar addicts and media addicts and fresh-air addicts, four-wheelers and two-wheelers and two-leggers, the church-going and the church-leaving, same sex and opposite sex, the bussed and trained and driven, individuals and couples and foursomes and small herds, the wired and wireless, tattooed and tanned and sunscreened and carefully face-masked, hand-holders and hands filled, the flip-flopped and well-heeled, the graceful and the waddlers, the harried and the unhurried, the buttoned-up and buttoned down and unbuttoned, capped and helmeted, shaved and shorn and bald, the groomed and the breeze-blown, the staged and the spontaneous.
There is just enough room for everyone at the intersection of Oak Park and Scoville Park, all living adjacent to one another, hand in hand, link by link, counting on each other, seeing eye to eye, as we do every day in our village.
This is our adjacency agency, our superpower: Living next to one another creates a tighter bond.
And it leads to a stronger community.
That’s the theory anyway — awaiting activation.