Andersonville

The sidewalks on Clark Street are too narrow to allow for social distancing, but the parking lanes are lightly used right now. Let's turn one of them into pedestrian space.

Paint-and-post sidewalk bump-outs and dashed bike lanes create a better environment for walking and cycling.

[This article also runs in Checkerboard City, John's transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the streets on Wednesday evenings.]

The Edgewater neighborhood along the north lakefront should be a pleasant place to walk. It's the second-densest community area in the city, with 56,521 residents in an area just 1.5 miles across, and boasts lively commercial areas like Andersonville. Yet local residents say that their neighborhood is effectively cleaved into two by a roiling river of car traffic. The north end of Lake Shore Drive pumps tens of thousands of cars through the neighborhood, first onto Hollywood and then to Broadway or Ridge and onto Clark and Peterson.

Yesterday DNAinfo reported that a block club is pushing to expand permit parking in Uptown and Andersonville, in response to complaints that workers at a nearby office building are taking up too many parking spaces on side streets. The Illinois Department of Human Services recently took over three floors of a ten-story building at 5050 North Broadway, owned by Imperial Realty, to house about 400 workers. The building is otherwise largely empty.

Even though Chicago may not be getting any Open Streets this year, we don’t have to worry about any shortage of opportunities to enjoy car-free streets full of live music, local food, and beautiful summer weather. Chicagoans can instead turn to the city's scores of summertime street festivals, including a new concept in Andersonville: two “Pop-Up Park & Market” events this summer.

Divvy and the Chicago Department of Transportation quietly launched a new bike-share station suggestion map yesterday. The new version features design and speed improvements (both versions were built by the software division at OpenPlans, Streetsblog's parent non-profit).

It was a sign of the times when the Chicago Department of Transportation celebrated the city’s 13th on-street bike parking corral this morning at the Cheetah Gym, 5248 North Clark in Andersonville. Nine years ago, when I worked as CDOT’s bike parking manager, I put plenty of blood, sweat and tears into trying to get a corral installed at this very same location. The gym’s owner was ready to bankroll it, and we had the blessing of the local chamber of commerce and alderman, but the CDOT higher-ups deep-sixed the plan, questioning the safety of placing racks in the street, although corrals were already common on the West Coast by then.

Andersonville’s vibrant, ped-friendly Clark Street business district just keeps getting better. Last year the strip got one of Chicago’s first “People Spots” at Clark and Farragut, which replaced car parking with a miniature park with benches and greenery, as well as an on-street bike parking corral next to the parklet and another one by the Hopleaf tavern, 5148 N. Clark. Now the neighborhood is about to get its second parklet, the fifth one in the city, this time on Clark Street at Olive, in front of Piatto Pronto Italian deli and the Coffee Studio café. The new space could open as soon as early May.