Juanita Irizarry stood toe to toe with Rahm Emanuel, and she didn’t just survive one of the nation’s most relentless politicians. She defeated and embarrassed the former mayor.
Emanuel was so furious about the Irizarry-led legal battle that forced “Star Wars” movie mogul George Lucas to cancel plans to build a $743 million museum on 17 acres of lakefront parkland, he derisively branded her group “Friends of the Parking Lot.”
On Tuesday, Irizarry announced she is ending her eight-year run as executive director of that group, Friends of the Parks, on Dec. 31.
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“I’ve been running marathons at a sprinter’s pace,” Irizarry told the Sun-Times.
“The organization is coming into a period of strategic planning, and I didn’t see myself being here in the long term. Friends of the Parks is coming up on its 50th anniversary in 2025. It really is an exciting time for the organization to consider how it wants to position itself for the next 50 years. It just seemed like time to pass the baton,” she said.
Weeks away from her 55th birthday, Irizarry refused to reveal her next public challenge, saying only that it will involve finding some other “good trouble” to get herself into.
The reference to “good trouble” was a favorite expression and battle cry of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis, a civil rights champion.
Irizarry considers the two-year battle that drove Lucas to build his interactive museum in Los Angeles “good trouble.”
When it was over, she claimed Chicago lost the museum because Lucas “wanted his way or the highway,” and Emanuel enabled him by creating the “false expectation” that City Hall could deliver an “illegal” lakefront site.
A rendering of the proposed Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which George Lucas wanted to build on lakefront land south of Soldier Field. Legal challenges to the project, led by Friends of the Parks, ultimately forced Lucas to abandon the plan and build the museum in Los Angeles.
Lucas Museum of Narrative Art / Distributed by the Associated Press
Even though the museum is now thriving in Tinseltown, Irizarry has no regrets.
“The lakefront of Chicago belongs to the people, and I am super proud of my role in helping to protect Chicago’s lakefront from development,” Irizarry said.
“George Lucas chose to build on land that is covered by the public trust doctrine and belongs to the people — not to private interests. That’s why he lost. He was welcome to build it somewhere appropriate, and he chose not to do that,” she said.
Asked about the challenges ahead for Chicago parks and the nonprofit charged with protecting open space, Irizarry talked about the migrant crisis that has forced the city to use Chicago Park District field houses as emergency housing for asylum-seekers.
“The question that Friends of the Parks gets most often these days is how to deal with migrants and unhoused neighbors living in parks. That will be a big part of the focus moving forward,” she said.
“Just trying to clear out the parks does not provide a real solution to a humanitarian crisis. We are looking toward solutions that make sure Chicagoans, everyday neighbors, get to use the parks and parks programming that we all expect to have, and at the same time, that Chicago can deal with the humanitarian crisis in a humane way.”
Irizarry stressed her remarks should not be viewed as a “critique” of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s handling of the crisis he inherited.
“This is a complicated policy issue that requires ongoing, creative solutions. Housing policy has to come to bear. Immigration and migrant policy has to come to bear. It’s not simply a parks policy issue,” she said.
Irizarry said her greatest regret is that she won’t be around to see a resolution of the lawsuit that Friends of the Parks filed in March.
It’s aimed at stopping the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from expanding the so-called confined disposal facility dump at the mouth of the Calumet River on Chicago’s Far Southeast Side.
“It was supposed to be turned over to the park district to be an extension of park land a couple of decades ago, and the Army Corps of Engineers recently proposed to continue the life of that dump, which was supposed to be closed and capped by 2022,” Irizarry said.
“I would love to see that through, but I don’t see myself sticking around long enough for that to happen,” she said.
Yet another piece of unfinished business is the plan to reimagine the Museum Campus, reclaim parkland and make Northerly Island the nature preserve it was intended to be — with or without the Bears.
Whether or not the football team stays in the lakefront stadium, there should be no “expansion of the footprint of Soldier Field for commercial development,” she said.
“We continue to agree with the goals of the plan to further green that area and encourage the city to use Soldier Field for more revenue-generating events inside the stadium, like concerts, in the event that the Bears do leave,” she said.
