Residents wary parks' upgrading temporary

In 1979, Garfield Park's fieldhouse was in such disrepair it wasvirtually unusable.

A Chicago Sun-Times series found that leaking pipes had eatenthrough the ceiling and walls of the meeting room, buckling theparquet floor. The 184-acre park had only one full-time recreationworker, and the crafts shops and other recreation rooms had beenclosed for years. The ceiling of the gym was too low to playbasketball.

In short, Garfield and numerous other parks on the West andSouth Sides were a mess, the victim of years of mismanagement andneglect.

"I remember driving by the lagoon," said Debbie Nelson, WestSide resident and a project coordinator for Friends of …