http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/c...,4815114.story
How to make Chicago better
City and suburbs enter a new era in planning how we live, where we live and how we get around
By Blair Kamin, Charles Leroux and Patrick T. Reardon | Chicago Tribune reporters
September 14, 2008
When Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, bicycles northward on the lakeshore pathway, he finds frustration when the trail dead-ends.
"At Hollywood," he said in an interview in his City Hall office, "it just stops."
Forty miles to the west, Jeff and Cathy Jones, he on an 8-speed, she on a 24-speed, enjoy the serene, wooded Fox River Trail about once a week—until they hit a 1.3-mile gap in downtown Aurora, where smooth pavement gives way to jagged rocks.
"You've got to get off and onto city streets," Cathy noted.
These breaks in parkland trails are examples of missed opportunities across the metropolitan region. Close gaps like these, and you not only heighten the recreational delights of hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans and suburbanites, but you also take a step toward knitting the region's diverse eight million people more closely together.
That's what Daley and planners across the region are dreaming of—and not just in terms of open space.
With next year's 100th anniversary of the legendary Burnham Plan that changed the face of Chicago, the city and its suburbs are poised at what some predict will be a new era in planning for how we live, where we live and how we get from one place to another. The high cost of gas is adding urgency.
The just-minted Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning is beginning to draft a comprehensive blueprint for the future of the seven counties that include Chicago and nearly 300 other municipalities. Chicago Metropolis 2020, a coalition of civic leaders, calls for doubling the percentage of people in the region who use public transit.
The Chicago Architectural Club is holding an international design contest for converting Union Station into a high-speed rail hub.
The Art Institute of Chicago has just opened the first of five exhibits displaying the original drawings from the Burnham Plan.
On Oct. 2, the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee will announce a plethora of events, including concerts, exhibits and lectures, to celebrate the anniversary. And the theme of this year's Chicago Humanities Festival, running Oct. 3 through Nov. 16, is "Thinking Big," in honor of the plan.
Often called the most important planning document in the region's history, the Plan of Chicago was written in 1909 by Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett on behalf of the Commercial Club of Chicago.
The plan gave the city its spectacular lakefront and such postcard icons as Navy Pier and North Michigan Avenue. And by leading to the creation of Cook County's forest preserves and anticipating the path of the region's highways, it framed the growth of the suburbs.
But the Burnham Plan was not completed, and now, a new generation of business and political leaders is seizing upon next year's celebration as a golden opportunity to finish key aspects of the plan and to frame new visions to deal with the problems of today.
Daley, for instance, has a vision of giving Chicago four new miles of lakefront parkland that would fill gaps now occupied by high-rises, apartment buildings and abandoned industrial sites. Although the mayor has no money available at the moment, he has named John Bryan, the former Sara Lee Corp. chairman, to head a committee that will look into building a continuous waterfront park stretching from Evanston to the Indiana border. Bryan spearheaded the creation of Millennium Park.
"I'm delighted that [Daley] wants to jump on it in some fashion," said Bryan, co-chairman of the Burnham Plan Centennial Committee, a group that is coordinating efforts to celebrate the anniversary.
The nascent Chicago effort is part of a broader push to fill more than a dozen significant gaps in trails and greenways across the region. On them, people bike, walk or jog through landscapes ranging from the skyscraper-lined pathways of Chicago's lakefront to the tree-lined trails snaking along the Fox River. Closing the gaps, planners predict, will open new ways to save energy, experience nature and turn back the tide of sprawl.
"Just as we think comprehensively about our roads, we should think that way about hiking and biking," said Gerald Adelmann, executive director of Openlands. The Chicago-based non-profit is proposing the completion of the projects as a major legacy of the Burnham Plan centennial.
On the North and South Sides, four of the city's 30 miles of shoreline remain inaccessible to the public. High-rises wall off the shore in most of Edgewater and in the stretch of South Shore between 71st and 75th Streets. From Hollywood Avenue north to the Evanston border, there is no continuous lakefront park, just Loyola Park and a patchwork of small parks.
At the moment, because of the city's budget crunch, Daley's dreams for closing these gaps are just that—dreams. "It's one of his long-term goals," said the mayor's press secretary, Jacquelyn Heard. "If he had his druthers, he'd do it."
Nevertheless, the mayor's appointment of Bryan to head a committee to look into the question is likely to spur concern from some lakefront residents and property owners, particularly in the Edgewater and Rogers Park neighborhoods on the North Side. They claim that new beaches and parks would lower property values, bring swarms of foot and vehicle traffic, and disturb residents' tranquility.
"There's still some opposition," Daley said, "but we're saying, in the long run, this is the best thing. We're talking about a huge open space for people there."
The mayor of Aurora, Illinois' second-largest city with a predicted 2010 population around 180,000, is preaching from the same open-space bible.
Last year, Mayor Tom Weisner unveiled plans to turn an underused, 30-acre strip along the east bank of the Fox River—lined with muffler and auto-repair shops and (until recently) a huge pile of tires—into his city's version of Millennium Park. Among its proposed features: An outdoor music venue modeled on architect Frank Gehry's popular Pritzker Pavilion and an elegant, curving pedestrian bridge sweeping over the river. Since then, state officials announced a $700,000 grant that will help Aurora pay for cleaning up brownfields along the river, including the site of the park.
Also last year, Aurora, the Kane County Forest Preserve District and the Fox Valley Park District agreed to spend $1.7 million to fill the 1.3-mile gap in the Fox River Trail.
"In the next century, [the river] will have a completely different role in our community," Weisner said.
There's an irony at work here: Aurora has been a poster child of sprawl, with its residents spread over 43 square miles in four counties (Kane, DuPage, Kendall and Will). Today, it symbolizes how suburbs are using the lure of open space to make their downtowns more lively and densely populated, thus defying the image of suburbia as an undifferentiated expanse of single-family homes on large lots.
The downtown's prospects are mixed. On one hand, it is blessed with attractive historic structures including the Art Deco-style Paramount Theatre and the 22-story Fox Island Place apartment building, once the tallest building in Illinois outside of Chicago. On the other hand, the Hollywood Casino, which opened in 1993, hasn't done much for nearby businesses, and the downtown still suffers from a perception of poverty.
Yet there are those like Judy Gagne who are attracted by downtown Aurora's history and character. The 38-year-old was walking her brown Chihuahua on a pink leash outside her condo in Aurora's River Street Plaza, a pair of four-story, brick buildings on the Fox River's west bank.
"I think there's potential here," she said. "I look at this like the South Loop in the city. In five or 10 years, it will be like the South Loop."
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I would hate to copy an idea but something similar to that Shanghai 2010 Expo Tower would look so fitting next to the Spire. A helix turning kind of design just seems like a natural fit.
). They feel traffic congestion is too high in the neighborhood already.
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