The Bloomingdale Trail

The park district's diligence with clearing the lakefront trail makes a lot of sense. The same should be true with The 606, but it's not.

It’s hard to believe it’s been less than a year since the Bloomingdale Trail, also known as The 606, debuted last June 6th (6/06). The elevated greenway already seems like a Chicago institution, and it’s a little hard to remember a time Wicker Park, Bucktown, Humboldt Park didn’t have a ribbon of recreational space running through them.

The Chicago Tribune’s new transportation columnist Mary Wisniewski, a former Sun-Times transportation reporter, is off to a good start. She’s written a number of article that show an interest in promoting sustainable transportation, rather than the windshield perspective that has been all-to-common in the mainstream media.

The Trust for Public Land’s Chicago director Beth White announced last week that she will be leaving Chicago to take a new job as president and CEO of the nonprofit Houston Parks Board, beginning in June.

[The Chicago Reader recently launched a new weekly transportation column written by Streetsblog Chicago editor John Greenfield. This partnership will allow Streetsblog to extend the reach of our livable streets advocacy. We’ll be syndicating a portion of the column on the day it comes out online; you can read the remainder on the Reader’s website or in print. The paper hits the streets on Thursdays.]

Although the Chicago Park District says nonstop commuting on the Bloomingdale Trail, aka The 606, is legal during park curfew hours of 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., the Chicago Police Department disagrees, and they currently clear the path of all users at 11.

Last summer, a Chicago Park District spokeswoman told me that, according to the park district code, it’s legal to commute on the Bloomingdale Trail at all times of day. But in the wake of the mugging of a cyclist on the greenway last Friday night, the agency seems to have flip-flopped on the issue – a spokeswoman implied that the 2.7-mile facility is closed between 11 p.m. and 6 p.m. However, if it was open 24/7, that would improve safety because there would more “eyes on the trail.”

Nationally known urbanist and ex-Chicagoan Aaron Renn recently threw shade on our city’s beloved new linear park with a blog post titled "How Chicago’s 606 Trail Fell Short of Expectations." He wrote that the new path, aka the Bloomingdale Trail, doesn’t hold a candle to the High Line in Manhattan, where he now resides. However, I’d argue that The 606 is superior on a few different levels.

Some 80,000 people live within a half mile of the Bloomingdale Trail, aka The 606, the 2.7-mile elevated greenway that connects Humboldt Park, Logan Square, Bucktown, and Wicker Park. Many of these residents regularly bike commute home from work or entertainment after 11 p.m. It’s only logical that these people should be allowed to use this car-free route to get home safely, rather than take their chances with drunk drivers on busy North Avenue or Armitage Avenue.