Why do we live in a world where the need for parks, for green things in the city, ever needs to be explained again?

Yesterday they--yes, I don't know who 'they' are; this is definitely just 'they'--started knocking down trees in the park across from our office. They're building a hotel, I hear, on this tiny sliver of land that's the only breathable bit of space in this neighborhood: a funky little landscaped park with benches and trees and a little river of a walkway that curves through it in a couple directions. There is grass where dog-owners chase fresh dog poop with their plastic bags, a few swollen protuberances that in Chi almost might be called hills, lots of poured concrete seating that skateboarders sand the edges off of after hours, a couple fountains, a few little beds with rotating plantings of annuals. It exists in the nexus of a lot of pedestrian traffic to the El and to other buildings, at the bottom of a deep well formed by the man-made creations around it.

The park has a feeling, as all such spaces in frantically up-building neighborhoods, of both great necessary solidity but then a horrible vulnerability when you are forced to think about it. I mean, it feels solid. Or at least it did. It should be, because it is. Psychically it provides a desperately-needed sense of openness, some decent feng shui in a block of funny herringboned buildings and land usage. The open air allows you orient yourself amidst the grid of streets which bounce up and down around the park in odd ways. The park is the reason there is natural light in our building, the open space it protects.

The park is across a street that, right in front of our building, dips down below sidewalk level, so that the flow of traffic suddenly turns into a monolithic river of motion rather than a herky-jerky collection of speeding city cars, as drivers come together and go faster toward the lake. You lean on the the railing at the edge of the walkway as cars go by below you like a rushing river, as if you could throw a stick in it and watch it float by, with this little of bit of respite in the form of the park across the way. The park, the flow of cars, are like shadow versions of bigger natural elements: the street is our river, this park our open field.

I've spent thousands of hours in that park, or so it feels, sitting on the wooden benches, dodging pigeons and stinky smells, hanging out and talking with coworkers or desperately trying to absorb sunlight or fixing my future in my head, me along with homeless people and office workers and dog walkers and tourists. Knowing it was there, even when I didn't avail myself of it, was tantamount to feeling okay and safe in the space I was in. I had a steam valve, a little breathing room, a place to be, a time-out.

I lost my job last month, and my last day is next week. There have been many sadnesses attached to this process, but yesterday, seeing the park suddenly blocked off at the perimeter with big screens as they get ready to tear up the park, as if somebody owned it, felt like an unbearable attack on human need.

Why do we ever have to justify or explain needing parks? Isn't life supposed to evolve, not devolve? What argument--complicated, defensive, sad, desperate, trite, angry, well-thought-out--anything--can ever defend them, when we should just know? A place that allows people to just be is never in vain, only benefits us. We talk as if open spaces are frosting and frivolity, but they exist down in the core of things that make life navigable and keep us taken care of as human beings.