Through 12 weeks of research, community engagement, stakeholder interviews and design exercises, MIN+ sought to understand our LaSalle Park community’s context, challenges and opportunities, and establish a menu of initiatives to better support our diversity of residents and improve public safety. We found that LaSalle Park is not lacking in community resources, but in stronger connections between those resources and the residents they intend to serve. Our findings resulted in four complementary proposals called STRENGTHEN, SHARE, CREATE, & CONNECT, that build on what already exists to encourage a healthier, more equitable sense of community on an individual and societal scale.
Over half of LaSalle Park residents, and the majority of its children, are concentrated in the SLHA LaSalle Park Apartments. Yet despite being surrounded by nonprofit, educational, religious, and community resources, proximity does not always translate into access, awareness, or participation. These findings point to opportunities for stronger connection at multiple scales.
STRENGTHEN: Build Up an Existing Recreation Resource
12th & Park Recreation Center provides one of the neighborhood’s largest concentrations of recreation space and free programming but is currently not serving many of LaSalle Park’s families. STRENGTHEN considers how increased operational capacity, staffing, partnerships, safety, and stewardship could make this existing public resource more reliable, welcoming, and accessible to LaSalle Park residents.
O’Fallon Park Recreation Complex offers a local precedent for alternative operations. While City-owned, the facility is managed by the Gateway Region YMCA, expanding resources and capacity for staffing, programming, and partnerships.
SHARE: Connecting Existing Spaces + Resources
LaSalle Park is home to numerous organizations providing recreation, family support, gathering space, education, food assistance, and other community resources. SHARE asks how these assets could function less as isolated destinations and more as parts of a connected neighborhood network.
Programming could travel between spaces, organizations could co-host activities, and available space could respond to needs elsewhere in the neighborhood. A community liaison or coordinating organization could help connect partners, spaces, schedules, referrals, and residents making collaboration easier where capacity and interest already exist.
CREATE: Fill Gaps with Flexible Space
CREATE considers what a flexible neighborhood third space could provide where existing resources do not fully meet identified needs. This strategy starts with the activities a community space could support: learning, recreation, family resources, gathering, and informal everyday use, and envisions what kind of built space could host these.
These uses could be accommodated by adapting existing space, expanding alongside an established community anchor, or creating a dedicated neighborhood space. An identified undeveloped parcel presents one potential opportunity for the latter, placing a new, highly visible, flexible resource adjacent to the SLHA LaSalle Park Apartments and along the neighborhood’s S. 10th Street pedestrian network.
CONNECT: Strengthen the Spaces Between
CONNECT shifts attention from individual destinations to the spaces between them. LaSalle Park already contains pedestrian routes connecting housing, recreation, community organizations, gathering spaces, and potential future investments, but these routes are not always experienced as a continuous, safe, or recognizable public network.
Incremental improvements to lighting, planting, seating, wayfinding, accessibility, and gathering spaces could strengthen these connections over time supporting visibility, activity, perceived safety, and more comfortable movement between neighborhood resources.
Want to find out how we got here? Read the full document.