Bloomingdale Trail

Crews will be demolishing a viaduct over Western Avenue this weekend as part of Bloomingdale Trail construction, necessitating the closure of Western and diverting automobile traffic and CTA buses to Damen and California, each a half mile away. People walking or biking will be rerouted to the underpasses a block away on either side.

The Bloomingdale Trail, AKA The 606, is not just going to be a great transportation and recreation facility. It’s also going to be an important educational resource for students at the 25 schools located within a ten-minute walk of the 2.7-mile elevated greenway and linear park. Today the Trust for Public Land, which is managing the project for the city and the park district, announced that it has hired Jean Linsner to design and implement educational programming for the trail and its five access parks. The two-year position is funded by Exelon Corporation as part of its $5 million donation to the Bloomingdale project.

At a community meeting Tuesday night at the McCormick-Tribune YMCA, planners discussed the final designs, construction schedule, and new name for the trail and "linear park" formerly known as the Bloomingdale. The newly coined appellation "The 606" is an umbrella term referring to the trail as well as five adjacent parks that will serve as access points.

[This piece also ran in Checkerboard City, John Greenfield's transportation column in Newcity magazine, which hits the street in print on Wednesday evenings.]

The High Line in New York City has been lauded for transforming abandoned freight rail tracks into an elevated walking path and park on the west side of Manhattan, but The Bloomingdale (formerly known as Bloomingdale Trail) will be even better. This is simply because the High Line acts as a tourist attraction, while The Bloomingdale will serve as a neighborhood park in areas that sorely need more green space, and a very useful car-free transportation link for people walking and biking.

Things are looking promising for our city’s latest high-profile public space plan, the Chicago Riverwalk extension. In an interview Tuesday with Streetsblog Capitol Hill editor Tanya Snyder, outgoing U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood implied that a Transportation Infrastructure Finance Innovation Act loan will soon be approved that will help bankroll the $90-100 million project.

After a few months of relative quiet since the last community meeting in September, there’s some news about the highly anticipated project to build a multi-use trail and “linear park” along the Bloomingdale Line. On Tuesday of last week, years after announcing its intention to open the trail, the city of Chicago finally purchased the right-of-way from Canadian Pacific Railway for one dollar, plus $105,000 in administrative fees associated with the railroad vacating the land. The city will eventually give the property to the Chicago Park District, which will administer the trail. “That’s pretty typical of what happens when the park district acquires land,” says Beth White, director of the Trust for Public Land, which is spearheading fundraising efforts.