tracks ’n’ ties
4
EYE ON:
Illinois’ Bloomingdale
Trail
By Laura Stark
At nearly 20 feet
above four north-
western Chicago
neighborhoods, the
Bloomingdale Trail
will be a park in
the sky. It’s a lofty
project to be created
from an elevated
rail line that once
was referred to as
an overgrown linear jungle.” After
the Canadian Pacific Railway ended
service here in the 1990s, the corridor
became strewn with broken glass and
trash. Plans for the rail-trail include a
dramatic facelift, featuring art plazas,
entertainment venues, flowering trees,
winding nature walks off the main trail,
an astronomy observatory, and benches
where trail users can rest and enjoy the
views.
A colleague calls it a ‘cultural super-
highway’ because it’s more than a trail;
it’s a park system and an art space,” says
Beth White, director of the Chicago
office of The Trust for Public Land,
which is heading up the project devel-
opment effort with the Chicago Park
District and other partners.
It’s such a unique trail,” says Eric
Oberg, manager of trail development
at Rails-to-Trails
Conservancy’s
(
RTC) Midwest
Region Office. “It will be an attraction
without a doubt. Not a trail in the world
is going to look like this.”
Championing the project has been a
10-
year effort for Friends of the Bloom-
ingdale Trail, an all-volunteer group
founded in 2003. “We thought there’d
be more opposition than there was,” says
Ben Helphand, the organization’s presi-
dent. “But people loved the idea.”
Since those formative years, RTC
has supported the project, providing
technical assistance as well as funding
for community workshops through its
Metropolitan Grants Program sponsored
by The Coca-Cola Foundation. Oberg
remembers the swell of positive energy
for the trail he encountered at one of
those early workshops. “There is a high
level of community pride with this trail,”
he says. “There’s been such an engage-
ment throughout the process. To see the
ideas turned into reality is inspiring.”
One can’t talk about an elevated
rail-trail without New York City’s High
Line entering the conversation, but there
are more differences than similarities
between the two projects. For one, the
High Line does not permit bicycling,
whereas the Bloomingdale Trail is
designed to be multipurpose, featur-
ing a concrete path for bicyclists and
a parallel soft-surface track for walkers
and runners. Another difference is size:
stretching 2.7 miles, the Bloomingdale
is almost twice the length of its counter-
part in the Big Apple.
The biggest difference is that
the Bloomingdale Trail actually goes
through dense urban neighborhoods,”
says Oberg. “This is where people live
and play and work and go to school.”
It’s ironic that a structure originally
designed to keep people out—the tower-
ing concrete walls deterred foot traffic
Trail Under Construction:
Bloomingdale Trail
Location:
Chicago
Used Railroad Corridor:
Canadian Pacific Railway
Length:
2.7
miles
Proposed Surface:
Concrete bicycle
path with adjacent soft-surface path
for joggers and walkers
rails
to
trails
u
fall.13
TOP: PHOTO BY DAVID SCHALLIOL, COURTESY OF MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH AND ASSOCIATES, INC.
BOTTOM: IMAGES COURTESY OF MICHAEL VAN VALKENBURGH AND ASSOCIATES, INC.
Current (left) and proposed (right) views of
the trail over Milwaukee Avenue.