Every park, like every person, has its own personality. Unfortunately, Grant Park's is schizophrenic.

This was all too apparent one June evening as Bob O'Neill pedaled his green, 21-speed bicycle through the most central of the city's parks, covering the same turf where, in just two weeks, millions of people would gather during the Taste of Chicago.

What confronted him was a scene of solitary grandeur, including a statue of Abraham Lincoln gazing out upon empty grass. Indeed, as O'Neill rode past a formal garden of hydrangeas near Buckingham Fountain, the lone living creature he encountered was not a human being but a duck.

O'Neill has a word for Grant Park when it isn't hosting hordes of visitors at the city's giant summer festivals. The word is "lonely."

His cure? Simple. "More everyday traffic."

The man making these pronouncements has a passion for this park. A 34-year-old educational consultant, O'Neill heads the Grant Park Advisory Council, a citizens' board that reports to the Chicago Park District. As an activist, he helped spur Mayor Richard M. Daley and the Park District into sprucing up Grant Park for the 1996 Democratic Convention by giving Daley and city officials his photographs of such unsightly park scenes as birds roosting in broken light posts.

His characterization of the park is right on. During festivals and other special events, Grant Park becomes the pulsing heart of Chicago's lakefront. It's where popes and queens and other world-renowned figures including a certain basketball player who wears No. 23, greet the adoring masses -- a spectacular setting for public spectacles.

Pedestrians flood Grant Park when Columbus Drive and other streets are closed to car traffic, as shown in this view from a Ferris wheel at Taste of Chicago.

But for much of the rest of the year, Grant Park just about drops dead.

In contrast to the joyful noise the festival crowds make, it's eerily quiet.

If the great American naturalist Henry David Thoreau were alive today, he wouldn't need to venture to Walden Pond for solitude. He could simply stroll through Grant Park's 323 silent acres.

This is the riddle of Grant Park: How can the same place that rocks and rolls during fests also be the perfect setting for Brahms' Lullaby?

Unraveling the answer means coming to grips with forces that have made entire stretches of the lakefront inaccessible and uninviting -- although facing up to such forces is something those in charge of the lakefront and Grant Park have been reluctant to do.

It is a tale of traffic engineers who tore up a public space with roads that make walking through it an intimidating ordeal.

It is a tale of architects who created a landscape of stunning visual power that lacks human scale.

And it is a tale of public officials, including Daley, who have been content to improve parts of the park instead of figuring out how to make all of it come alive.

Now, however, Chicagoans have a chance to resuscitate the heart of their lakefront.

Millions of dollars in public funds are about to be spent on the park for such improvements as creation of the Lakefront Millennium Park, a $150 million, 16-acre festival site that will be built on a deck over a railroad yard in the park's northwest corner, and a $30 million road in the park's railroad trench that will speed conventioneers between downtown hotels and McCormick Place.

A longtime eyesore, Grant Park's railroad trench will be decked over in the park's northwest corner. But to the south, it will stay open and ugly.

If these unrelated projects become the impetus for a broader effort that looks at Grant Park as a single, integrated whole, then the park can become as alluring to the everyday visitor as it is to the festival reveler.

But that won't happen by adhering to the ideals of the turn of the century, when the park was conceived as a promenade ground for ladies carrying parasols and men in straw boaters. That won't do anymore, not in the age of Rollerblades and Spandex.

It will take looking to the future and imagining this very formal park with a lot less starch in its collar.

It will necessitate a new attitude in a city where bigger always has been synonymous with better: Small is beautiful too.

"When you look at a great park, it has lots of little spaces," says Fred Kent, president of the Project for Public Spaces, a New York City group that monitors parks nationwide. "It has a large community and small communities."

And it will require citizen activism, building on the efforts of past visionaries, namely the settlers who in 1836 decreed that what is now Grant Park should be "Public Ground -- A Common to Remain Forever Open, Clear and Free" and businessman Aaron Montgomery Ward, who in 1890 began 20 years of court battles that kept everything from stables to squatters' shacks from desecrating the people's park.

Modeled on Versailles

Grant Park is a populist symbol of Chicago, adorning postcards, book covers and tourist posters. Its place in our mind, says Walter Netsch, former president of the Chicago Park District board, "is as strong as Michael Jordan's."

Take away Grant Park, and downtown Chicago might as well be Cleveland or some other second-tier city along the Great Lakes. The park is simultaneously a grand forecourt for the wall of skyscrapers along Michigan Avenue and the equivalent of a royal estate, its lineage tracing back to the gardens of Versailles.

Built atop landfill dumped into the lake, the park consists of a series of rectangle-shaped outdoor "rooms" that increase progressively in size as they move east toward the lake: small along Michigan Avenue, bigger along Columbus Drive and biggest of all along Lake Shore Drive.

During the summer festivals, these formal, French-inspired rooms are incongruously filled with the wail of electric blues, the smoky scent of outdoor grills and thousands of casually dressed people chomping on ribs and every other kind of food imaginable.

From the vantage point offered by a helicopter, the scene is extraordinary: An ever-shifting, amoeba-like mass -- a people's army -- floods into the closed-off streets that divide the rooms and takes over the park, making the aristocratic pleasure ground its own.

In such moments -- or when it is host to dignitaries like Pope John Paul II, who celebrated mass in the park in 1979 -- Grant Park becomes an extraordinary example of creating common ground amid sprawling, diverse culture.

People of different races and classes meet. They share turf. They experience the same event. And though they may not become friends, at least they get along, if only for a few hours.

Here, public space plays a significant social role, acting as the glue that helps to hold an often-fractious metropolitan area together.

The trouble is, the special qualities that cause the park to become so vibrant -- the food, the musical acts and the presence of lots of people, which in turn attracts more people - aren't present the rest of the year.

But there's more to it than that.

Think about those closed-off streets and how they turn the park into the equivalent of a car-free zone.

Then contemplate what happens when the streets are reopened to vehicular traffic. Pedestrians going from the Loop to the lake must negotiate Columbus Drive, an eight-lane road where drivers routinely ignore the 30 m.p.h. speed limit, and then Lake Shore Drive, a 10-lane road whose 45 m.p.h. speed limit is just as regularly flouted.

Not exactly a walk in the park.

Along Lake Shore Drive, just east of Buckingham Fountain, people on foot are allowed just four seconds before a flashing red hand indicates that traffic will be resuming momentarily.

Seeing multiple lanes of vehicles speeding toward them, tourists such as Terry Greiner, a 53-year-old Keota, Iowa, farmer, scamper across the Drive, arms pumping, legs driving.

"It doesn't last very long, does it?" gasps Greiner, referring to the "walk" light.

Ironically, this is the very spot where a red carpet was rolled across Lake Shore Drive in 1959 to enable a visiting Queen Elizabeth II to cross decorously from her yacht to Buckingham Fountain. Ever since, the lakefront promenade across from the fountain has been known as "Queen's Landing."

But with the exception of festival weekends, when police operate the traffic lights between Queens Landing and Buckingham Fountain, pedestrians hardly ever get "Queen for a Day" treatment.

"If we weren't out here, a lot of these people would be dead," says one police officer. "I've seen so many close calls it's scary."

A lack of human scale

It's as if Grant Park's rooms were patches of green floating on a sea of asphalt.

And those rooms aren't furnished to welcome you, either, as a comparison between New York City's Central Park and Grant Park shows.

- Central Park has 4,486 park benches in its 843 acres, or 5.3 benches per acre. - Grant Park has only 482 benches on its 323 acres, or 1.5 per acre.

This isn't just nit-picking.

A park bench is like a sofa to which your host directs you to sit upon; it sets a tone of hospitality.

Grant Park's lack of benches doesn't beckon people. It repulses them, negating Daley's efforts to clean up the park's rooms along Michigan Avenue and adorn them with brightly colored flowers.

"It's a trying experience, not a comfortable experience, to eat lunch here," says Steve Sobczak, a 35-year-old commodities trader, sitting on a concrete step near the corner of Jackson Boulevard and Michigan.

Even a superlong gray picnic table placed on the grass between Randolph and Washington Streets across from the Chicago Cultural Center - it's actually a piece of public art -- draws as much criticism as praise, with some brownbaggers complaining that its rows of contiguous seats make it impossible to have a private conversation.

True, the Park District has made some positive moves, such as creating the handsome new restaurant pavilions around Buckingham Fountain, where parkgoers can sit and watch the fountain's geyser-like water jets spout skyward.

But that sort of people-friendly gesture is all too rare, as exemplified by the fence around the frilly fountain.

The fun of a fountain is getting close to the water, feeling its coolness warding off the summer heat.

That's what happens at the modern fountain at Navy Pier, where kids run through columns of water that shoot up from the ground, or at Central Park's Bethesda Fountain, where one can sit along the fountain's bluestone ledge.

In contrast, the curving metal fence around Buckingham Fountain, which has surrounded the fountain for at least 60 years, actually pushes people back.

It's a landscape seemingly designed in a mood of fear -- needlessly, according to James Reilly, chief executive officer of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority (and a lawyer), who says, when asked about legal liability and the Navy Pier fountain: "We've never worried about that."

Similarly, Douglas Blonsky, the administrator of Central Park, reports that no one has ever drowned at Bethesda Fountain, although one fellow temporarily lost his pet boa constrictor when the snake decided to go for a swim.

Park District Supt. Carolyn Williams Meza has promised to look into removing the fence around Buckingham Fountain.

A fence and a Chicago police officer prevent Chelsea Home, 3, of Denville, N.J., from getting close to Buckingham Fountain. But Navy Pier's fountain invites children to frolic in its waters.

She denied that the lack of benches in Grant Park is designed to prevent homeless people from sleeping in the park -- a charge made by some -- saying that it's not a high-priority issue because people aren't grousing about it.

Yet why not just fix the problem instead of waiting for complaints?

Indeed, looking at Grant Park proactively rather than passively is precisely what's needed to cope not only with small problems like fences and benches, but with the larger ones that make the park an underachieving public space.

That's because several big projects that are under way or on the drawing board offer a window of opportunity to reshape the park dramatically.

In addition to the Lakefront Millennium Park, which will feature a 2,500-space parking garage and a terminal for buses bound for Navy Pier beneath its surface-level parkland, they are:

- The $30 million busway in the park's sunken railroad trench, due for completion in late 2000.

- A $1.5 million plan that calls for using the dirt being excavated to create Millennium Park to raise the level of Grant Park's sunken and little-used northeastern corner, alongside easternmost Randolph Street and the Lake Shore Drive "S" curve (no completion date set yet).

- Decks that will cover the railroad trench immediately north and south of the Art Institute, allowing the museum to create more office and gallery space, as well as gardens open to the public (no cost or timetable yet).

- Construction of a parking lot with space for 850 to 1,580 cars in a pennant-shaped parcel of land at the level of the railroad tracks in the southwest corner of the park, with an estimated cost of anywhere from $14 million to $27 million (not funded yet).

By coordinating these and other projects, as well as the agencies involved with them -- the Art Institute; the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which is the force behind the busway; the Chicago Department of Transportation, which is responsible for Millennium Park; and the Museum Campus authorities, who are pushing the pennant-shaped lot to create some much-needed close-in parking -- the Park District can heal what ails Grant Park.

Yet that will take a master plan, which the district doesn't have -- though Ed Uhlir, the project director for the Lakefront Millennium Park, says the mayor is "very interested" in putting one together.

The sooner the better.

If no thought is given to making Grant Park more pedestrian-friendly, then the new underground parking decks will simply turn the park into a glorified stopover point for getting to Navy Pier and the Museum Campus.

'Sunday in the Park'

To excel at the care and feeding of the pedestrian, Daley can take some simple, inexpensive steps that fall under the rubric of "traffic calming," a philosophy he already has practiced in Chicago's neighborhoods, putting trees and shrubs in the middle of intersections to slow down cars.

Emulating what Milwaukee has done on its lakefront, Chicago could create variable speed limits on the portion of Columbus Drive that cuts through Grant Park.

One speed limit, set at 35 m.p.h., would be for the morning and evening rush hours, as well as nighttime hours when the parks are closed.

The other, 25 m.p.h., would be for midday and weekends, when the needs of pedestrians rather than drivers should predominate.

With proper enforcement, the limits would turn Columbus from the equivalent of an expressway into a park drive, so pedestrians won't have to sprint across it.

Signs for drivers might help (perhaps something like "Welcome to Grant Park, Richard M. Daley, Mayor. SLOW DOWN!"), as would strips of cobblestones at key intersections.

Netsch broadens that idea with a valuable proposal of his own that he calls "Sunday in the Park," an allusion to the Art Institute's famous Georges Seurat painting, "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte," which is itself a celebration of public space, portraying a crowd of Parisians -- middle-class people, working-class folks, even prostitutes -- mingling on an island in the Seine.

To allow the heart of the park to beat again, Netsch suggests closing Congress Parkway between Michigan Avenue and Columbus Drive on Sundays, while also shutting down a portion of Columbus.

It's a wonderful idea, and it can be furthered, as Netsch proposes, with median planters in Columbus Drive -- if they can be made as graceful as those on Lake Shore Drive. Care also should be taken to ensure that the planters don't squeeze out metered parking now along Columbus, inconveniencing those attending Buckingham Fountain's nightly show and softball players who use Grant Park's ball fields.

Imagine Columbus Drive on Sundays "as a pedestrian mall without cars, a shady walkway with roving street vendors. It would even act as our shopping street for Taste of Chicago," Netsch writes in his plan, which he made public at a June symposium on the future of Grant Park.

"Imagine horse and buggy rides around the park," he continues. "Imagine a walkway without cars from Michigan Avenue to the lake."

Delightful squares of light draw pedestrians to the Museum Campus from Grant Park in this handsome underpass beneath Lake Shore Drive. A similar, walker-friendly underpass between Buckingham Fountain and the lake is under study.

Also deserving a hearing are city proposals that would enable pedestrians to traverse the park's roads more easily, including a Monroe Drive underpass to link the Millennium Park and the Art Institute, a bridge that would join Millennium Park to the parkland to its east, and a 50-foot-wide underpass at Queen's Landing.

Admittedly, the $11 million price tag for the Queens Landing underpass is not small. Yet when you look at how a comparable underpass -- bright, spacious and inviting -- has enabled people to walk to the Museum Campus in serenity rather than fear, the benefit justifies the cost.

Grant Park's rooms can be humanized, too, following models that exist right in the park.

One can be found in the north and south gardens of the Art Institute, which offer an astounding variety of places to sit -- benches, ledges, steps -- as well as shade trees and sculptures like Alexander Calder's red-painted steel sculpture, "Flying Dragon."

As a result, people tend to linger here and come in groups more than they do in the park's other rooms along Michigan Avenue.

The other example is the popular outdoor dance program put on the past two summers by the city's Department of Cultural Affairs across Michigan Avenue from the Cultural Center.

At one of these events, dancers, mostly older folks, kicked up their heels as a chorus of strings played tunes like "In the Mood." Thought was given to providing places for them to sit; to get a chair, people turn in their driver's license or some other form of ID.

"People are writing me letters and saying, 'Thank you for the free chairs,'" says the city's Commissioner of Cultural Affairs, Lois Weisberg. "People are so grateful for any little amenities you can provide them."

Much more can be done to add to the appeal of Grant Park.

The Park District can:

- Build playgrounds and tot lots, like those at the edge of New York's Central Park, to serve families living in nearby developments such as Central Station.

- Create a "cultural mile" between Congress Parkway and Randolph Street that would extend the intimate, intricate landscapes of the Art Institute's gardens east and west.

- Promote the park's existing attractions, like Grant Park's formal gardens, or create new ones, such as a Halloween festival.

There's talk, too, about beautifying the new busway in the railroad trench. But why put some silly-looking murals there when the money would be better spent improving Grant Park's existing parkland?

What's more important is to heed Netsch's environmentally responsible call that the buses in the busway be as technologically advanced as possible, so as not to befoul Grant Park's air with clouds of dust and fumes.

Paying for these improvements won't be hard, not if the mayor builds on the effort to get Millennium Park created with the help of corporate contributions and marshals the support of downtown business leaders.

After all, it's their employees who are using Grant Park.

The little human details that make such a big difference pale in comparison to the cost of major infrastructure projects.

Besides, some of them can be paid for privately, following Central Park's lead of offering commemorative plaques on park benches in exchange for donations.

It all comes down to having a vision and the will to get it done -- and to citizens, like O'Neill, who push public officials to keep on improving the public realm.

Without a plan, Grant Park will get marginal, cosmetic improvements.

With a plan, the park with a split personality can become happy and whole, the centerpiece of the reinvention of the lakefront.