I don't know if this was posted anywhere, and I'm not sure this even deserves it's own thread, but why the fuck are we even contemplating erecting another expressway in the heart of the city, when we should be planning light rail expansion either elevated or subway . These mother fuckers!
In the cross hairs of the Crosstown?
Expressway talk stirs hopes, fears. Memories of original plan still live in city.
The Â"LÂ" line runs above Lake Street at Cicero Avenue in Chicago, where a proposed Crosstown Expressway would be built. The idea for a 22-mile highway through the city that roughly parallels Cicero Avenue from the North to the South Side was revived in the state Legislature by House Speaker Michael Madigan on Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2007. The original Crosstown proposal was pitched by the late Mayor Richard J. Daley in the late 1970s, but got squashed by community opposition
By Ron Grossman and Rex W. Huppke
Tribune staff reporters
Published February 25, 2007
Judging from the time-worn sign above his cluttered upholstery shop window, Ernest Meyer seems an unlikely spokesman for change.
The sign announces: "Uphol eri g." He figures it's been there long enough that people either know the Jefferson Park business or they don't--why change?
Yet when politicians last week revived a more than 40-year-old and seemingly long-dead plan to run the Crosstown Expressway past Meyer's shop, he thought it made sense.
He and his family have been re-covering sofas in this small space on Milwaukee Avenue since the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, the idea of an expressway came and went, beat down in large part by opposition from Meyer's neighbors and others along a portion of the route that roughly parallels Cicero Avenue from the North to the South Side.
The changing images along the route--used-car lots lined with beaters and groceries filled with ethnic delicacies, vibrant businesses and vacant lots--resemble Hollywood's version of a classic big-city thoroughfare.
But turn onto the side streets and the landscape becomes more uniform. Block after block is lined with the simple and squat brick homes that define a swath of Chicago called the Bungalow Belt. It's a part of the city largely unknown to lakefront dwellers and out-of-towners. For the people who live there, the bungalows and tiny yards are their small share of the American dream.
Yet now, as was the case several decades ago, there is the possibility of change, politicos chattering about a mammoth expressway that could rend some communities and bring life to others.
This grand experiment could all begin in Jefferson Park, right outside Meyer's upholstery shop. He knows many fear the proposal, but he sees it as a key to growth.
"People in the future will like it," he said. "But now, maybe not."
Jefferson Park, like many neighborhoods along the proposed path, has changed considerably since the original idea was championed by Mayor Richard J. Daley in the early 1960s. At that time, the far Northwest Side community was only partially developed, its tree-lined streets looking more like a suburb than an urban neighborhood.
But now the city has caught up. The populace has become a mix of young professionals, Hispanic immigrants and Poles. Condos and lofts have sprouted among the traditional frame cottages and storefront apartments.
Moving a mile and a half down Cicero, more of the same is happening in Portage Park, which boasts a booming shopping hub that has survived the arrival of suburban malls.
Ted Szabo, president of the Portage Park Chamber of Commerce, doubts his neighborhood would embrace Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan's proposal.
"I can't imagine it helping property values having an interstate running through the community," he said. "I just can't foresee people being very happy about that."
The chamber offices on Irving Park Road are in a business district known as Six Corners that was the heartland of resistance against the earlier highway proposal. Just down Irving Park is the LaSalle Bank, which doubles as a Saturday-night movie house, featuring films that were old when the first Crosstown proposal was defeated.
South from Portage Park, the windshield frames an increasingly hardscrabble stretch of Cicero Avenue. The din of traffic is joined by the near-constant sound of fluttering flags at used-car-dealerships. Businesses and apartments are flanked by buildings whose boarded-up windows give them the look of faces without eyes.
North Lawndale welcome
Crossing Lake Street, the Green Line trains rattle three-stories overhead. An interstate passing over that hurdle would give motorists the feel of riding a roller coaster.
Just past Interstate Highway 290, a short detour along Roosevelt Road a few blocks east of Cicero, reveals a Baptist Church in North Lawndale that would welcome the expressway as a pipeline for worshipers. It's a struggling neighborhood that has seen generations of residents migrate to outlying, middle-class communities.
Nearby boulevards are lined with former synagogues that once enjoyed the long-distance loyalty of North Lawndale's original Jewish settlers. Lovie Gordon, the Baptist church's assistant secretary, said many of their nearly 2,000 worshipers commute in for Sunday services, and could do so more quickly with a north-south highway.
When Cicero Avenue cuts into the town of Cicero, just east of the hotel Al Capone once used as his headquarters, it rolls past the Hawthorne Race Course, an almost bucolic moment in an industrial landscape.
Across the street from an array of towering cylindrical petroleum storage tanks, wedged between aging brick buildings, is the 24-hour Hot Grill, the embodiment of an urban greasy spoon.
At the corner of the Formica-topped counter, trucker Ron Bianchi hangs half off his stool and looks out the window at a familiar scene--semis fighting six lanes of traffic.
"I think it'll go through this time," he said of the expressway proposal. "You get too much truck driving through here. To go from Belmont to here, it'll take you more than an hour. An expressway would make a big difference."
Tapping a pack of Camel Lights on the counter, Bianchi, who lives in Cicero, recalled the original plan, bitterly debated by rival politicians and residents who feared displacement.
Bianchi favored it then and favors it now, but like a true Chicagoan he has no illusions about the politics beneath the pavement. To him and the likeminded, it's the price of progress.
"It was always a question of who's filling whose pockets," he said. "It's who's feeding who."
While some worry about the side effects of progress, Bianchi points out that there is a risk to not building. He believes the area just east of Cicero Avenue, along the railroad embankment that would have carried part of the expressway, never developed due to fear the road would wipe it out.
Who would invest money in land that's going to be taken away for a public works project? The answer, judging by the current landscape, is junk dealers, sawmills and body shops.
It's a philosophical issue that cuts both ways for Mark Topor, manager of Bobak's Sausage Company, which lies just east of Cicero Avenue, hard-up against the railroad tracks Bianchi described.
Many of Bobak's customers -- largely first- and second-generation Polish-Americans -- have left the neighborhood but still return to shop in an old-world atmosphere where the smells and language are enticingly familiar. Like the North Lawndale Baptist Church, the cavernous sausage shop and restaurant could benefit from easier access.
But Topor recognizes a couple caveats: "As long as we're not under the bridge or on the exit ramp."
Leaving Bobak's and moving south, Cicero Avenue winds through Midway Airport, past once-booming motels that now stand half-used and shuttered, relics of a time before much of the city's airline activity shifted to O'Hare International Airport.
But even here there are hints of change. A Starbucks stands beneath Midway's flight path, in a spot where once there more likely would have been a diner pouring coffee at a third the price.
Past 66th Street and a few blocks east is the home of Theresa Kobey, a widower who has spent the past 30 years living in a home emblematic of the Bungalow Belt. When she and her late husband moved there from Bridgeport in 1978, friends thought they were crazy--don't you know they're going to tear up the neighborhood?
Indeed, her new home would have been near the southern end of the Crosstown, just before it curved east and stretched out to the Dan Ryan Expressway.
Kobey lived with uncertainty for several years, until it became clear the expressway would never be more than talk. Standing on her front porch, overlooking a lawn statue of the Virgin Mary, she bemoaned the fact that once again a politician is eyeballing the train tracks that rub shoulders with her tiny back yard.
"I was a newlywed then, now I'm a widow," said Kobey, whose husband died in 2001. "Where would I go?"
But if history serves as any guide, Kobey has little to worry about.
In 1963, the original Mayor Daley spoke of his plan with unflagging confidence.
"There's no doubt construction will start on the Crosstown," he told reporters. "You can write that down."
Yet to this day, nothing more than trains rumble past Kobey's home, following a line that marks, for some, a nightmare never realized, for others, a dream unfulfilled.> |
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