A disc golf course is finally coming to Riverside after years of work from the village, but some residents are still unhappy with where the course will be placed.
After drawing mixed reactions from residents last summer, village officials expected the course to be installed last month. At the Riverside Village Board’s June 6 meeting, Village Manager Jessica Frances said the disc golf course will start to be installed this week in the wooded area of Indian Gardens and near the baseball diamonds south of Fairbank Road.
In an April memo to the village board, Parks & Recreation Director Ron Malchiodi wrote that the department had finalized the course layout with suggestions from residents in mind.
“We solicited and received feedback from the community, including neighbors who live across from the proposed course. We held walk-throughs, took their specific feedback and adjusted the layout of the course to their requests,” he wrote.
While the course is set to be installed no matter what, there are still Riversiders who say its location — in particular, the placement of three of the nine baskets west of the unpaved one-way road jutting out from Fairbank Road — concerns them.
Cathy Maloney, who lives on Scottswood Road, said she believes the disc golf course should not be installed in that area because of its historical importance. She said that in the late 1800s, around the time when Riverside was designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux, people would visit the Indian Gardens area to investigate the native flora.
“You had early collectors — and I’m talking about the late 1870s — that we have records of, who would come here and just see what the different plants were,” she said.
Maloney added that some of the first conservationists after the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 visited the area to walk next to the Des Plaines River.
“A lot of people would come from Chicago, and they would walk along that trail,” she said of a path accessible near the Scout Cabin. “All the way along and up, and then all the way up to River Forest. Along here, it used to be full of blooms, crabapples, hawthorns and a lot of native plants, and that’s how they would learn about nature.”
Lisa Lambros is a member of Riverside’s Landscape Advisory Commission (LAC) who stepped down as its chair on June 1. She agreed that the historical use of the area is important and compared it to how Riverside residents still use Indian Gardens today.
“I think it’s important for us to understand our history and understand how critical, at least, that point is,” she said. “We have other areas that are used for recreation … and it makes a lot of sense. I think [of] how parks & rec has had it with the tennis courts — they’re separate, you know, you’re not birding in that specific area. But when we’re up by Scout Cabin, that’s where you see people birding and walking and looking at plant material, and really focused on nature.”
Lambros said, as a member of the LAC, she was surprised at how far the disc golf project had progressed before she and other commissioners knew about it; she said the commission invited Malchiodi to speak about it at a meeting in January or February this year.
Dan Murphy, president of the Frederick Law Olmstead Society of Riverside, said he and the society are supportive of the disc golf course, but they have the same concerns as Lambros as to how the space is used today.
“We see that in the Indian Gardens park area, there is a considerable amount of land that could be used for the disc golf course, but the choice to locate it on a narrow strip of land, as it were, between the river and the street, we think is a less-than-optimal location from the standpoint that that’s sort of a corridor for hikers, birders and joggers,” he said. “We’re all for outdoor recreation, and we think that’s consistent with Olmstead’s vision for Riverside.”
On the other hand, Maloney and Lambros questioned whether it makes sense for Riverside to interrupt the kinds of recreation already happening at Indian Gardens in order to install the disc golf course.
“The one thing I didn’t understand personally is, it’s not like we’re in a disc golf desert, right? It’s not like there aren’t full disc golf courses within a short driving distance from us,” Lambros said. “It’s not like, oh, we’re bringing something, really, to the general public that makes a lot of sense.”
“Let’s confine it to where it belongs. Let’s respect the nature that is what makes us unique, Riverside unique, and a historic landmark,” Maloney said. “There are disc golf courses in Berwyn and Brookfield and Stickney. … We’re changing something that’s been in place for 100 years that does not really add anything that people can’t get within a mile.”
Lambros said that, while the village is moving forward with disc golf course’s installation, she hopes to spread the word about the importance of Riverside’s parks and passive recreation spaces.
“I look at, is disc golf that important in the big scheme of things? In life? Not so much,” she said. “But do I believe in protecting and educating people on what Riverside is? Absolutely.”
