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Exploring Pike Creek
Jul. 31st, 2014 10:38 amYesterday, I stopped at my advisor's place after a half day of work to explore upper Pike Creek. She was surprised to see me, as she thought that we were meeting today. I was quite certain that we'd decided on Wednesday, so I was pretty embarrassed at having potentially messed up my dates and disrupted her schedule. But she was willing and happy to go exploring Wednesday afternoon too, and told me I'd caught her just before she was going in to the office for work she could as well do tomorrow. (Later that evening, I looked at my calendar and discovered that I had, in fact, scheduled it for Thursday with her. *sighs* I really am bad with dates sometimes, which is why I use Google Calendar so much. This time, I had calendar fail too!)
Date confusion notwithstanding, my perception was that I was notably more myself and mentally on top of things than I was the last time we got together, when we met with a history professor to discuss our project. Yay sleep!!
I had brought four maps, from the 1920s through the 1970s. The two of us started at Washington Park, upstream of the tunnelized section downtown, and followed it west and north by bicycle. We went through an open, disused gate onto golf course grounds and bushwhacked for a stretch along the bank. We made our way around the golf course fence to find the end of a southerly-facing branch that now disappears under a school. In the area, we found a couple interesting brick columns plunked erratically along an otherwise unbroken fenceline. They look like remnants from some grand wall that the hurricane fence has replaced; I'll have to do some comparing to figure it who owned the land and what it might have surrounded. We biked along a road that the creek seems to have been right in the middle of ninety years ago, and found that a park that the stream once traversed had become a bank and its drive through on one end, and Diver Dan's dive shop on the other. The fact that there was a nautical-themed building sitting on top of a long-vanished body of water was a fun twist of fate.
Continuing northwest, we followed the former course of Pike Creek under a major intersection where I assume it's again tunnelized, and into the grounds of Gateway Technical School. Gateway has a horticulture facility named after Pike Creek, which is again on the surface behind their campus. From there, it goes west through some hilly, undeveloped land to Bradford High School where my dad teaches sometimes. This area near the two schools was once all part of a TB sanitarium called Willowbrook, probably after the willow trees that still stand here on the banks of the creek. I had not quite realized, though, that the creek here was the Pike!
We ended our bike excursion at a large park containing a retarding basin, a big flood plain area, and a sledding hill in the middle created by excavation of both of those features. The park has a nice crushed limestone trail that loops around the area and had a center branch following the crest of the hill. We were a bit surprised to see so few people there. Then I realized that, in these designed-for-the-automobile outskirts of Kenosha, here was a giant park with absolutely nowhere to park a car! I suspect users are primarily from very nearby apartment complexes, who come to walk their dogs or enjoy a stroll. In fact, it's named after the apartment complex. This park is really interesting to me from an urban planning perspective. It's interesting to me that so much work was done, and money spent, on a place with little accessibility for most Kenoshans. It also seems unusual that this area combines functional space with recreational space; most cities, as I commented to my advisor, seem to have an iron curtain between those things and never the twain shall meet. There was also an interesting sign there talking about the history of the park and its water control functionality.
It was time for her to pick up her dog from doggy day car, but we still wanted to see the headwaters. So we biked back to her place for her car, leaving our bikes in the garage. We picked up her dog and drove just west of the park, to an old Polish cemetery from a now-defunct congregation. To the south, the ground slopes sharply down and is covered in undergrowth; it seems quite likely to be the headwaters of the branch of the creek we were exploring. She and I and the dog had a great time tramping around. The cemetery was really interesting too; many stones seemed much newer than the death-dates on them, looking machine-cut to me. Also, the stones ringing the grounds at the outer fence were almost all children or infants, whereas the stones in the center were a more typical age range.
I took some photos all along our explorations. If any of them seem interesting, I might post and geotag them and talk about them. We're planning another expedition next week, this time to trace a northerly branch of Pike Creek. We would both like to get some hip waders and trek through the water at stretches; it would be much easier to follow the creek if we weren't trying to find our way along paths through thick foliage that only affords an occasional glimpse of the watercourse.
Perhaps the most abstract realization this trek gave rise to is that the way Kenosha as an entity has interacted with and changed the creek has produced a body of water that is disjointed and unconnected. There are many lengths of the creek that remain above ground, but the curtailing of movement around them makes it nearly impossible to put them all together into a single conceptual entity. As occasional unremarkable gulleys and rivulets, they have lost their connection to a name and a whole. The removal of the whole lower Pike Creek below Washington Park has, I think, disrupted not just the ecosystem of the stream, but it's existence as an entity. And, just as urban development is increasingly decentered and fragmentary (a la Los Angeles versus Chicago), so do once-whole features of the landscape become disrupted, fragmented, and forgotten, transformed into localized features that are disconnected from a whole.
Date confusion notwithstanding, my perception was that I was notably more myself and mentally on top of things than I was the last time we got together, when we met with a history professor to discuss our project. Yay sleep!!
I had brought four maps, from the 1920s through the 1970s. The two of us started at Washington Park, upstream of the tunnelized section downtown, and followed it west and north by bicycle. We went through an open, disused gate onto golf course grounds and bushwhacked for a stretch along the bank. We made our way around the golf course fence to find the end of a southerly-facing branch that now disappears under a school. In the area, we found a couple interesting brick columns plunked erratically along an otherwise unbroken fenceline. They look like remnants from some grand wall that the hurricane fence has replaced; I'll have to do some comparing to figure it who owned the land and what it might have surrounded. We biked along a road that the creek seems to have been right in the middle of ninety years ago, and found that a park that the stream once traversed had become a bank and its drive through on one end, and Diver Dan's dive shop on the other. The fact that there was a nautical-themed building sitting on top of a long-vanished body of water was a fun twist of fate.
Continuing northwest, we followed the former course of Pike Creek under a major intersection where I assume it's again tunnelized, and into the grounds of Gateway Technical School. Gateway has a horticulture facility named after Pike Creek, which is again on the surface behind their campus. From there, it goes west through some hilly, undeveloped land to Bradford High School where my dad teaches sometimes. This area near the two schools was once all part of a TB sanitarium called Willowbrook, probably after the willow trees that still stand here on the banks of the creek. I had not quite realized, though, that the creek here was the Pike!
We ended our bike excursion at a large park containing a retarding basin, a big flood plain area, and a sledding hill in the middle created by excavation of both of those features. The park has a nice crushed limestone trail that loops around the area and had a center branch following the crest of the hill. We were a bit surprised to see so few people there. Then I realized that, in these designed-for-the-automobile outskirts of Kenosha, here was a giant park with absolutely nowhere to park a car! I suspect users are primarily from very nearby apartment complexes, who come to walk their dogs or enjoy a stroll. In fact, it's named after the apartment complex. This park is really interesting to me from an urban planning perspective. It's interesting to me that so much work was done, and money spent, on a place with little accessibility for most Kenoshans. It also seems unusual that this area combines functional space with recreational space; most cities, as I commented to my advisor, seem to have an iron curtain between those things and never the twain shall meet. There was also an interesting sign there talking about the history of the park and its water control functionality.
It was time for her to pick up her dog from doggy day car, but we still wanted to see the headwaters. So we biked back to her place for her car, leaving our bikes in the garage. We picked up her dog and drove just west of the park, to an old Polish cemetery from a now-defunct congregation. To the south, the ground slopes sharply down and is covered in undergrowth; it seems quite likely to be the headwaters of the branch of the creek we were exploring. She and I and the dog had a great time tramping around. The cemetery was really interesting too; many stones seemed much newer than the death-dates on them, looking machine-cut to me. Also, the stones ringing the grounds at the outer fence were almost all children or infants, whereas the stones in the center were a more typical age range.
I took some photos all along our explorations. If any of them seem interesting, I might post and geotag them and talk about them. We're planning another expedition next week, this time to trace a northerly branch of Pike Creek. We would both like to get some hip waders and trek through the water at stretches; it would be much easier to follow the creek if we weren't trying to find our way along paths through thick foliage that only affords an occasional glimpse of the watercourse.
Perhaps the most abstract realization this trek gave rise to is that the way Kenosha as an entity has interacted with and changed the creek has produced a body of water that is disjointed and unconnected. There are many lengths of the creek that remain above ground, but the curtailing of movement around them makes it nearly impossible to put them all together into a single conceptual entity. As occasional unremarkable gulleys and rivulets, they have lost their connection to a name and a whole. The removal of the whole lower Pike Creek below Washington Park has, I think, disrupted not just the ecosystem of the stream, but it's existence as an entity. And, just as urban development is increasingly decentered and fragmentary (a la Los Angeles versus Chicago), so do once-whole features of the landscape become disrupted, fragmented, and forgotten, transformed into localized features that are disconnected from a whole.
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