The rerouting of Lake Shore Drive puts parks before people.
Lake Shore Drive is an area that is already adorned with flowers, trees and lakeside vistas. The city now plans to enhance the Drive with the expenditures of millions of dollars. The area will be even more a place for leisure walks, picnics and playful consorting.
This area of bliss is in stark contrast to only a short walk away to the corner of 22nd and State, where the public-housing projects start. Here the streets aren’t so pretty.
Chicago is a city that can find justification to build trolleys when we have buses, trains and cars. We have philantropists who donate tens of thousands of dollars to house whales. We have corporate leaders who will mortgage the farm to finance Navy Pier and legislators who will mortgage their souls to support fleets of gambling boats, and we have city officials who plan to spend millions of dollars re-creating parks where beautiful parks already exist.
In the City of Chicago, we house our fish better than we house our people. We seem to choose profits and egos again and again over the real needs of the citizens, such as good and safe housing, quality education and equal opportunity to use that education.
The money that we now plan for the aesthetics of Lake Shore Drive should be used to improve the quality of life for the poor by buying books before roses, building houses before aquariums or training people before seals.
What we need to do is put people before parks or before anything else. We need a city that will guarantee to each resident a quality education and a fair chance to use that education. When we achieve these goals, then maybe a stroll down 22nd Street will be like a walk in the park.
