Once an empty lot, Chicago high school celebrates its new field of dreams

CHICAGO (CBS) — For years, students at one high school in Chicago's Austin neighborhood walked past an empty dirt lot on their way to class.

That lot is now a state-of-the-art turf football field and the community turned out for the celebration of the transformation.

Give a kid a field, and they'll show up to play. Charles Anderson waited and worked seven years to give kids the field.

"I love it," Anderson said. "The school colors are black and gold!"

Anderson is the principal at Michele Clark Academic Prep Magnet High School, 5101 W. Harrison St., and he takes pride in his school and the Austin neighborhood.

"They should know that this is in their backyard," Anderson said.

Few had the vision he did for the empty lot next to campus.

"It was just so much garbage over here that people couldn't see that this would be a field," Anderson said.

But after years of convincing and funding from Chicago Public Schools and other donors, it's hard to picture what may have been here before.

What used to be an empty and abandoned lot is now a field that belongs to a school and an entire community.

"If you open up something in Austin, there's no way that you should say, 'It's mine.' What you should say is 'It's ours,'" Anderson said.

On Friday, high schoolers like Anthony Spivey shared the field with elementary school kids.

"It's for the whole community. The whole community can come and use it whenever they feel," Spivey said. "We got a scoreboard, a press box, and stands. We basically have everything we need now."

Now that everyone sees his vision for a field, the principal pictures what else he can give his kids.

"Our students over here in Austin deserve everything that any other student gets," Anderson said.

The school was named after Michele Clark, who worked as a reporter at CBS 2 in the early 1970s. Soon afterward, she became the first Black woman to serve as a network correspondent for CBS News.

Clark died in a plane crash back in 1972.