For the millions of people who venture to Chicago’s lakefront every summer, particularly those on the long-ignored south shoreline, getting from the city to the shore is no walk in the park.
Between McCormick Place and the Museum of Science and Industry, for example, the Metra railroad tracks and Lake Shore Drive raise a barrier wider than several football fields. And ugly footbridges, like the one at 35th Street, hardly beckon parkgoers to cross them.
The problem ought to concern not just Chicago residents, but everyone who uses the lakefront, including suburbanites and other visitors. If fewer people drive to the shoreline, that can only mean spending less time in a Lake Shore Drive traffic jam — and more relaxing in the parks.
A soon-to-be-undertaken, federally funded study promises to make it easier for people to get to the lakefront and may also pave the way for such long-overdue steps as extending the lakefront bike path south to the Indiana state line.
But while the study is welcome, there’s a twist, once you realize that much time and money already have been spent on plans for reshaping the south lakefront parks and rebuilding South Lake Shore Drive.
The fact that yet another study needs to be done–when much of what it will cover should have been addressed in the earlier plans–shows just how uncoordinated planning for the lakefront is.
And in the long run, the lack of a coherent planning process could leave key chunks of the lakefront as hard to reach as they are now.
“Somebody needs to bring it all together,” says Luann Hamilton, the director of transportation planning for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT).
She’s the driving force behind the new, $400,000 study, which will examine public access to the entire south lakefront, from McCormick Place on the north to the Indiana border on the south.
Sometime this month, CDOT will select a team of architects, engineers and planners to conduct the study. The proposal, scheduled to be finished in early 2001, will provide detailed solutions. It also will set priorities, suggesting which projects should be done first–and how to pay for them.
Why, one might reasonably ask, is such a study necessary?
After all, in the last few months, the Chicago Park District has released plans for Burnham Park, Jackson Park, the South Shore Cultural Center and the Midway Plaisance.
Meanwhile, the Illinois Department of Transportation just concluded public hearings for its $90 million rebuilding of South Lake Shore Drive between McCormick Place and 67th Street, which is scheduled to start in 2002.
Unfortunately, those plans are either vague or leave crucial gaps in figuring out how to improve public access to the lakefront.
The Burnham Park plan suggests building seven pedestrian bridges between 29th and 53rd streets, but does not say how they should look, how much they would cost or who would pay for them.
For its part, the Lake Shore Drive proposal calls for constructing pedestrian underpasses at 57th, 59th and 63rd Streets, and improving pedestrian access on an existing bridge at 31st Street. Yet it is mute on the subject of more footbridges in Burnham Park, leaving open the possibility that none will be built during the upcoming revamp of South Lake Shore Drive.
Why? Because IDOT argued that it should only be responsible for pedestrian-friendly features, like the proposed underpasses, that will be directly affected by the rebuilding of South Lake Shore Drive.
New bridges, the agency says, would not be.
“This is incomplete planning,” complains Erma Tranter, director of Friends of the Parks, the non-profit advocacy group.
And it is not an isolated example, as CDOT’s Hamilton points out.
Consider the lakefront bike path, which currently ends at 71st Street, just outside the massive gates of the South Shore Cultural Center.
The city’s plan for South Works, the former U.S. Steel mill, calls for new bike trails within the borders of the development, which extends from 79th Street on the north to 91st Street on the south.
Yet the South Works plan does not specify how to link those trails to Rainbow Park on the north and Calumet Park on the south.
Nor has anybody in city government taken up the touchy matter of how to punch the trail through the exclusively residential area between the South Shore Cultural Center and Rainbow Park, an area comparable to the high rise-lined stretch of North Sheridan Road that has no shoreline parks.
Should landfill be dumped into Lake Michigan to create these links? Maybe, but that might raise a hue and cry among residents, as similar plans have on Sheridan.
For all these reasons, and more, it makes eminent sense for CDOT to carry out its access study.
Hamilton, for example, wants to look in detail at possibilities for building boulevards–“greenways,” she calls them–that will lead people from their neighborhoods to the bridges and underpasses that, in turn, enable them to reach the lakefront. Such a holistic approach is precisely what the lakefront requires.
But as the need for this study shows, Chicago still lacks that broad vision, both in specific matters and overall. And the shortcoming has occurred even though task forces of various city, state and federal agencies have been set up to work on the south lakefront park and roadway plans.
With those proposals getting ready to be built, and with South Works offering other coordination challenges, it still isn’t too late for Daley to appoint a powerful lakefront commission or, as the Tribune’s editorial page has suggested, urge the Chicago Plan Commission to take up the task.
Either way, the city needs a leader who can A) get all the agencies on the same page; B) galvanize public support to pay for the improvements; and C) set spending priorities so money is not siphoned away from the much-needed south lakefront projects by the clout-heavy citizens who live along Lincoln Park.
In urban planning, how you do things invariably effects how they turn out; the process helps determine the product.
With millions of dollars in public funds on the line, and with the experience of millions of parkgoers hanging in the balance, the remaking of Chicago’s shoreline can only be improved by retooling the planning push that will shame it.
