Umbra showed up, padding demurely through the crowd on the sleek, long legs that have helped make her a world-class swimmer among canines. Her owner, too, was among the protesters–Ted Erikson, a marathon swimmer now 73, the second man ever to swim across the English Channel and back, non-stop. They and their neighbors crowded the aisles and lined the walls of a South Side building lobby, shouting down engineers and city officials. They had gathered to fight a project they consider a threat to a serene stretch of lakefront called Promontory Point, a training ground for long-distance swimmers and a popular area for generations of picnickers, sunbathers, joggers and bicyclists.
“We will go to war over this!” declared Peter Rossi, who regularly goes for mile-long swims off the Point at 55th Street in Hyde Park. The coalition of South Siders has taken on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the City of Chicago to try to alter the erosion-control project, which is already under way along some stretches of lakefront. The plan calls for stripping away the weathered limestone blocks that have lined the shore for decades and replacing them–at Promontory Point and elsewhere –with a concrete-and-steel seawall. Whether the protesters prevail may determine how the lakefront looks for the next 100 years.
The city and the Corps of Engineers argue that the $300 million project is needed to stop Lake Michigan’s relentless waves from washing away the shoreline. But the Hyde Park protesters, who include a physicist and an oceanographer, maintain that the project is “over-engineered,” is based on faulty data and makes access to the water more difficult than the limestone blocks. They also argue that the stark design “brutalizes” the lakefront.
Rossi and other protesters who were shown the plans at that January meeting felt betrayed. They said officials from the Chicago Park District and the Department of Environment had assured them of various features, including easy access to the water, but that these features had disappeared by the time the meeting was held. In place of the limestone steps that now lead gradually down into the water were tiers of concrete ending with a sheer wall of steel.
The crowd was so angry that Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) and Ald. Leslie Hairston, who were at the meeting, quickly assured the crowd that construction, which was scheduled to start this spring, would be delayed until next year.
Hyde Parkers had already seen a portion of the wall, which is being built in stages, go up last year just north of Promontory Point. “The beautiful, naturalistic shoreline has been replaced with an ugly construction that looks like an industrial harbor,” Hyde Park Historical Society President Alice Schlessinger wrote in an April 17 open letter to Rush, whose district includes Hyde Park. Schlessinger said some members “are literally willing to lie down in front of the bulldozers to prevent the destruction.”
The South Siders are not alone in their objections to the project’s design. “I call it the Alcatraz look,” said Robert Clarke, president of the Southeast Lakeview Neighbors, a North Side citizens group that has seen a segment of the seawall installed just north of Belmont Harbor.
The standard concrete-and-steel design will be used in various parts of the project, which is to be completed along a total of eight miles of lakefront between Montrose Avenue and the 79th Street water-treatment plant. Few critics of the seawall dispute the need for controlling lake erosion. But protecting the shoreline, they say, shouldn’t come at the expense of aesthetics or recreation. Chicagoans still seek out the lakefront to enjoy the beautiful big-city vistas, to picnic, to read, to bask in the sunshine, to dangle their feet in the lake’s cool water.
And to swim. For more than 40 years, Erikson has been swimming at Promontory Point. Umbra, found as a stray, joined him some 10 years ago. Together, man and dog have logged some impressive accomplishments, including a 2.7-mile swim in 1994. Besides his own distance records, Erikson is hailed as a hero of the Point, one of those who have risked jail for a swim. In 1987 and again in 1988, Erikson and others were arrested for open-water swimming. “We went to jail and went to court,” he recalled. “The judge said, `What’s the charge?’ They said, `Swimming in the lake, Your Honor.’ The judge said, `We’ve got rapists. We’ve got murderers. And you’re wasting my time with swimming? Dismissed!’ “
Eventually the police and the Park District backed off, but only after Erikson and other swimmers held a defiant “swim-in” and drew up a pro-swimming petition. The deep-water swimming, though officially banned as dangerous, has continued, and today Chicago can boast of five swimmers who trained in the Point’s open waters and then conquered the English Channel’s 21 miles of cold, choppy currents. One is Erikson, and another is his son, Jon, who in 1981 became the first person to do a non-stop three-way crossing.
Part of what bothers lakefront activists about the project is that they had a hand in shaping it. At first the Army Corps had planned to line the lakefront with rocky rubble, an idea that horrified civic groups from one end of Chicago to the other.
“We said, ‘You can’t treat Chicago’s lakefront in that manner,’ ” recalled Erma Tranter, director of Friends of the Parks, a watchdog group. That design, said Tranter, would have kept Chicagoans from walking at the water’s edge or sitting there to read, picnic or sunbathe. “We had severe frustration,” she said.
City officials worked with citizens groups to revise the plan, and when activists finally were presented with the concrete “step-stone” design, they were pleased, Tranter said. It wasn’t perfect, maybe, but it was better than a pile of rubble.
Then the work began.
For months, parkgoers north of Belmont were blocked from the lake by chain-link fences and mountains of crushed rock as the wall was constructed. “Then, when the fences finally came down [a year and a half ago], we took one look and found it horrifying,” said Charlotte Newfeld, chairwoman of the Lakeview Citizens Council’s Parks Committee. “What you had between you and the water was a corrugated metal wall. To our horror we realized the whole lakefront was going to be girded in metal.”
Back when the rubble idea was replaced by the concrete seawall proposal, “we were lulled into a sense of accomplishment,” she said. “Even when we saw the plans in drawing, it wasn’t like the stark reality.”
After anger over the project erupted, Marcia Jimenez left her offices at the city’s Department of Environment to face the protesters at a community meeting. “I stood up and looked at the people, and I know them and they know me,” she said. “It’s the same project we all worked hard for.”
Yet even Jimenez agreed that things looked different on the drawing boards. Now, she said, you can actually walk up to the wall and “you go, ‘Wow, that’s what 84 feet of steel looks like.’ “
In Jimenez’s downtown office are stacks of reports that date back to the 1970s. Each one addresses the threat of erosion along the lakefront. In 1986, Lake Michigan was at a historically high level and that year and again in 1987, storms pounded the shore, flooding parts of Lake Shore Drive. The city sought federal funds to protect its land, roads and infrastructure.
To help the effort, Jimenez inventoried the entire Chicago lakefront: parks, purification plants, McCormick Place–everything from tennis courts to water lines to wiring. “In 1991 dollars,” she said, “the value of Chicago’s lakefront was well over $5 billion.” Eventually the city received $174 million in federal funds for the $300 million anti-erosion project, Jimenez said, and the State of Illinois chipped in $42 million. Other partners are the city and the Chicago Park District.
Federal funds meant the involvement of the Army Corps of Engineers, which is mandated by law to develop the most economical anti-erosion design, said Joanne Milo, project manager for the Corps. She noted that federal funds can provide no more than 65 percent of the cost of the cheapest plan, the original “rubble mound.” Anything above that, she said, must be funded locally.
At first the idea of a brand-new lakefront inspired an array of imaginative designs. “Some were very elaborate, with offshore islands and things like that,” Milo said. “But the cost was phenomenal.”
Little is left of that initial creativity, though a 300-foot expansion of parkland and a new beach are planned for the section between 37th and 41st Streets. Beyond that, Chicago’s lakefront–unless plans change–will be lined largely with the concrete-and-steel design.
“It just came down to cost,” said Milo.
Newfeld, Clarke and other North Siders know it’s too late to do anything about the lakefront north of Belmont, but they hope to stop the concrete structure from being built elsewhere as planned. After hearing of the uproar at Promontory Point, Clarke invited two Hyde Park activists–Kay Clement and Lauren Moltz–to a Southeast Lakeview Neighbors meeting in April. The meeting focused on the shoreline south of Belmont to Diversey Avenue, set for construction next year.
When the South Siders walked in, Clarke joked about “different planets” coming together. But it became apparent that their concerns about the lakefront project echoed those to the south.
“The tumbling rocks are what people love so much,” said one man.
“I’m a swimmer,” said another as Milo, Jimenez and several Park District representatives listened. “I hope you don’t change that [water] accessibility.”
A woman at the meeting said the new wall is not just unattractive, but also dangerous. “I already heard about a dog who jumped in by the finished part and couldn’t get up,” she said. The owner, who went in after the dog, couldn’t get up the wall either, she said.
Rungs are welded into the metal walls, but the ladders aren’t easy to see and don’t go over the top of the wall. “How do you heave yourself over this sharp metal edge onto this rough concrete?” Newfeld asked. Jimenez assured residents that the ladder rungs would be painted yellow so they’d be easier to spot.
She also said “we’re committed to trying” to reuse the existing limestone, but that has its problems. During meetings on Promontory Point, officials said that it would be difficult to build a new wall from the existing rocks, and that new shipments of limestone are hard to find and very costly. Indiana limestone was used to build Chicago’s seawalls between 1910 and the 1930s, said Milo. Though city officials said large limestone blocks are now hard to find, some quarries–such as the Independent Limestone Co. of Bloomington, Ind.–still cut such “breakwater” blocks, said company manager Steve Cummings.
Still hoping to avoid the concrete altogether, some activists are trying to determine the cost of rebuilding the original stone wall.
The continuous edge of limestone is a major feature of Promontory Point, which was inspired by Daniel Burnham’s celebrated 1909 plan for Chicago’s lakefront. Schlessinger of the Historical Society says the Point was developed in the 1920s and designed in the 1930s by the late landscape architect Alfred Caldwell. Richard Bumstead, a landscape architect also working to preserve the Point, says Caldwell is “the guru of landscape design” whose other credits include the Lincoln Park Zoo Rookery. The Hyde Park Historical Society is working to get the Point on the National Register of Historic Places, which would help protect it.
Up on the North Side, activists such as Newfeld would have preferred to keep the limestone north of Belmont too. But officials said the new structure was not only more economical, but also necessary to adequately defend against the lake’s onslaught. Newfeld questions that assertion. “Why did the City of Chicago and the Park District accept the Army Corps of Engineers analysis so quickly?” she asked. “There was no second opinion.”
No second opinion in her neighborhood, that is. When planning officials got to Hyde Park, “they ran into us,” said Rossi, who formed the Promontory Park Community Task Force with Clement, Moltz and others. They are unusually well-qualified to challenge the Corps of Engineers’ data. Rossi (who is married to a Tribune reporter), is a professor at the University of Chicago’s graduate school of business, a specialist in statistics. Other Hyde Park protesters include architects, attorneys, chemists, a physicist–even a professor of oceanography.
“It [the opposition] really was a surprise,” said Milo.
Besides the ready pool of experts, the Hyde Parkers had their political representatives, especially Ald. Hairston, strongly behind them. “If they want to fight, let’s fight,” Hairston said at a task force meeting last month. “We’re still the South Side of Chicago.”
The task force reviewed a report by engineer Bill Weaver of STS Consultants, which was hired for the project by the city. Rossi took the report to his university’s department of geophysical sciences and consulted with Gidon Eshel, professor of physical oceanography and a Point swimmer.
Eshel found that the proposed structure was designed to withstand a “200-year event,” the most powerful lake force that Chicago’s shore would face in an average 200-year period, a rare combination of high water levels and the strongest possible waves.
Few would dispute the awesome power of the lake’s dramatic storms, but Eshel argued that the revetment design was based on “overblown” estimates of potential lake water flow. One estimate looked at a “10-year event,” a storm so powerful that it hits
only once in an average decade. If the engineer’s report were correct, such an event would “cover 6.6 miles of Lake Shore Drive or eight city blocks to a depth of one foot in one hour!” said a task force memo that used Eshel’s expertise.
That figure was based on “more than the maximum lake levels observed in the 20th Century. So we felt that was just an error,” said Rossi. Gerald Marsh, a physicist on the task force, agreed that the project was vastly “over-engineered” and based on studies that should be redone.
The Army Corps has received similar criticism elsewhere. Two recent reports, one by the Army inspector general and another by the National Academy of Sciences, say the Corps has used incorrect data to justify unnecessary large-scale construction in other parts of the country.
Milo says, however, that she is certain that hasn’t happened with the lakefront plan. Corps data for the Lake Michigan project were carefully derived from computer models and other state-of-the-art methods including “two-dimensional cross-section models set in a wave tank,” she said. “We’re open to anybody coming in and looking at our documents and results.”
Jimenez also points out that lake levels, not just
the intensity of storms, have to be considered. Lake Michigan is now very low, but any erosion-control design must withstand even record highs, when water would rise almost to the promenade level and storm waves could easily top it. “I’ve watched waves fly over the Shedd Aquarium,” she said. “I’ve watched waves fly over the Adler Planetarium. I’ve stood at Promontory Point and gotten drenched.”
Hyde Park critics already have persuaded officials to scale down the wall at Promontory Point somewhat. Park District Supt. David Doig and William Abolt, commissioner of the Department of Environment, presented a Hyde Park meeting last month with a modified plan that would reduce the height of the wall. Two planned “drainage gaps” also would be reduced by 75 and 40 percent, respectively, and part of the promenade would be narrowed from 26 feet to 16 feet.
Responding to Ald. Hairston and the task force’s requests, Doig and Abolt made other promises:
– The limestone would be reused to create two 300-foot long “stone platforms” that would start at the edge of the promenade level on each side of the Point. They’d step down gradually into the lake, allowing easy access to the water.
The cost of this and other modifications hasn’t been determined, Jimenez said. A less massive structure would be less expensive, for example, but limestone platforms would push the cost back up. Any additional funds would come from the city and Park District.
– Rocks would be piled elsewhere to hide most of the steel wall from view.
– Bike paths would be raised where the wall blocks lake views.
– Construction would be staggered so that one side of the Point would remain open at all times, except for a four-month period.
– Swimmers at the Point would get something they’ve never had before: a designated open-water swimming area.
Earlier, at a community task force meeting, Doig promised that the city would not arrest swimmers who went beyond the proposed official deep-water area, said Tom Knight, a distance swimmer. “That’s a breakthrough.”
For those who aren’t serious swimmers, Knight’s sense of victory may be puzzling; after all, Chicagoans are allowed to swim at beaches that stretch from one end of the city to the other. But beach rules peeve distance swimmers, who question why they can practice their sport in other parts of the country where “swim at your own risk” signs are posted, and they’re left to enjoy open waters. Here, those who head for the deep open water are routinely ordered back to shallower, more crowded areas where it’s harder to swim long distances at a steady pace. Once you’ve swum the English Channel two or three times, that just isn’t acceptable.
Moreover, dogs are usually banned from most city beaches, leaving Umbra and other water-loving canines few options. When officials first announced plans to replace the Point’s rocks with a sheer wall, Ted Erikson was worried. “I don’t know how a dog is going to get in,” he said. Under the compromise, though, Umbra and the other canines that regularly swim off the Point could clamber down to the water.
Some of those who frequent Promontory Point are pleased with the design compromises; others are pushing for more.
“You’ve got a great opportunity here to become heroes,” David Gantz, another Point swimmer, told Supt. Doig and Commissioner Abolt at last month’s meeting. “You guys could become the Daniel Burnham heroes of today.”
The crowd broke into applause. Doig smiled. Sitting in the front with other task force members, Moltz was hoping for the best. Before she and Clement traveled north to the Lake View meeting, they had gone to see the completed construction near Belmont Harbor. “It looks like a runway. It’s hideous,” said Moltz. “It disconnects people from the lake, and that’s the best part of Chicago.
“I think they’re worried about us, that we’re going to incite people on the lakefront to ask for more. Why not? Why not ask for more? It’s too important and it lasts too long.”
Milo concedes that, under community pressure, the Corps’ plans could undergo more changes. “There’s always the possibility of changing things as we go along, but I have to say the cost wouldn’t be a federal cost,” she says. “The city would pay for it. We’d build whatever they want as long as they pay for it.”
Whatever it is, it will be here for a long time.
The Corps requires a minimum 50-year “design life,” said Milo, and the design already in place north of Belmont and in other areas “is expected to last more than 100 years.”
In Lake View, Newfeld is well aware of that when she thinks of the North Side stretches that aren’t yet completed. “We need thoughts, ideas, brain power. We need architects,” she said. “Fortunately for the whole city, there were people alerted when it comes to Promontory Point.”
Knight agreed. “I don’t know what the rest of Chicago will do, but they should do something,” he said. “I would like to encourage them to say, `We want to swim.’ “
