Spring was officially delivered to the West Loop in early May. It came in the form of big burlap bundles of blooming fruit trees and shrubs trundled off trucks and planted by landscapers in Adams-Sangamon Park. With each delivery, it became easier to imagine this long fenced-off lot growing into a long-promised park.

Adams-Sangamon Park will add necessary green space to an increasingly dense neighborhood. I welcome the park for more than its green dividend. As a place where neighbors can sit and talk, children can play, and people can walk their dogs, it will be one of the few spaces in the West Loop where community will be created by the accidental and repetitive meeting of people. Jane Jacobs, the great urbanist and author, believed that these interactions created what she called the “trust of a city street” and generated a “feeling for the public identity of people, a web of respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need.” These are the ties that simultaneously enrich our private and public lives and that people increasingly seek when looking for a community to call home.

With a price tag in the millions and years in the making, Adams-Sangamon Park and its community building potential were neither cheap nor quick to come to fruition. A rapidly growing neighborhood in a financially strapped city needs alternative ways of building community and a richer public life. One such alternative is to enliven existing public spaces and temporarily repurpose vacant private land in the West Loop.

The West Loop public spaces ripest for reinvigoration are our streets. For the last two years, CTA contractors fenced off the last hundred yards of Peoria Street where it dead ends above the Eisenhower Expressway at the Halsted/UIC Blue Line Station to serve as a construction staging area.

When work was recently concluded, the fenced-off zone was again opened to cars. What could have been a winning little plaza connecting the el with UIC’s College of Urban Planning and the university’s art gallery was sacrificed for six parking spaces.

With the constant flow of students and commuters through the area, a minimal investment in a few tables and chairs, some planters and a coffee cart would have created the West Loop’s own mini-Left Bank on the Eisenhower. Instead we have a dead end street where no one lingers.

As a community abutting a major university, I can also imagine West Loop streets with book stalls and corners enlivened by kiosks where you can buy newspapers, magazines and a cup of coffee and then enjoy them while sitting on adjoining street furniture.

Privately-owned vacant lots in the West Loop are the other big opportunity. While we wait for the real estate market to revive, let’s convert these litter-gathering “negative” spaces to temporary “positive” public spaces.

The lot at Van Buren and Aberdeen, now circled by a collapsing chain link fence and ripped tarp, could be the site of a giant screen showing World Cup soccer matches this summer. Other lots could host installations of public art, become community gardens or farmers markets. Aldermanic discretionary funds, community foundation grants and public-private partnerships could provide the necessary seed funds for the projects and compensation for the owners for the temporary use of their property. Neighborhood residents could come together to brainstorm about the lots’ programming and its duration.

You will certainly find me in Adams Sangamon Park this summer, eating lunch before heading back to the office. While enjoying the paths, playground and plantings, I will be chewing on more than my sandwich. I will be wondering how we can spark the creativity and generate the minimal dollars necessary so that the life that will animate this park can be spread to other corners of the West Loop.