Wednesday, April 11, 2007

How about indoor park for jogging, walking, biking?

I introduced a thread a ways back about incorporating a water park into a private high rise development.

Let me try something a little more municipal here:

Chicago has great parks, but we can only use them when the weather is right. In the winter and during nasty fall or spring weather, they are not well used.

How about Chicago considering an indoor park...glass domed? While, of course, not being nearly the size of our outdoor parks, it would be big enough to incorporate the following (its main purpose being a pleasurable setting for transport-related exerecise):

• continuous paths (with turnoffs) for walking and jogging

• another (not connected to the one aboe) continuous paths (again with turnoffs) for biking.

the whole park could be landscaped with warm weather folliation (like palms) and it could have lagoons and streams (with bridges) throughout. As noted, it would allow for choices as to where to go with turnoffs within both the walking/jogging portion and the biking portion. If the lagoons could be used for swimming, so much the better. A restaurant could give you the opportunity to eat "outdoors" at any time of the year.

The only expense that would differ from a traditonal outdoor park would be the dome (but using domes for recreational purposes is becoming more and more common).

I would place this park (of course) inland and ideally somewhere west of the Loop where the Circle Line is going to go to make transportation to it easy and to encourage growth along the Circle Line itself.

such a structue would be a tremendous tourist attraction and would help make Chicago winters seem shorter to those Chicagoans who use it. It would take advantage of our current ability to make the indoors feel like the outdoors.

Good suggestion...or not??????????????????>

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