Despite names that include words like “park” and “square,” these neighborhoods are desparately short of open space.
As the effort gradually gained momentum, the City
and the park district asked TPL to coordinate the private part of the public-private partnership. In one effort, TPL acquired land for the Julia de Burgos Park, which would become one key entry point for the trail. TPL also began to raise funds for the project and organize community meetings to inform neighbors about the trail and park and solicit ideas about the plan. But the project didn’t really switch into high gear until
the election of Rahm Emanuel as mayor in February 2011. During the campaign, park proponents took the idea to all four mayoral candidates, Beth White recalls, and all four embraced it. But Emanuel promised publicly that if he were elected, he would make the trail happen. “‘You know, Beth, this is a project that will transform the city and the neighborhoods,’” she recalls him saying. “‘And it will tell a story about who we are as a people.’”
DARCY KIEFEL
The Trust for Public Land’s Beth White and Ben Helphand of Neighbor- Space discuss plans beneath a Bloomingdale Line viaduct in 2007.
will set The Bloomingdale apart from New York City’s $153 million High Line rail park, opened in 2009. Not only will Chicago’s park be twice as long as the one in New York, it will also be “totally for the neighborhoods,” Kelly says. “And it’s for Joe Public’s neighborhoods—for the rank-and-file Chicagoan.”
GETTING ON TRACK Even before the trains stopped rolling in the early 2000s, city officials and planners began thinking about wheth- er the old rail line should be demolished or reused. In 2004, an open space plan for Logan Square proposed a “Bloomingdale Linear Park” as one of 11 opportunities in the dense, park-starved neighborhood. Soon after that, TPL began working in the Logan Square neigh- borhood, helping neighbors and the park district double the size of local Haas Park by acquiring an adjacent prop- erty. But a trail along the old Bloomingdale rail corridor would be a much more ambitious project.
BY THE NUMBERS: THE BLOOMINGDALE
Park acres to be created by The Bloomingdale: 13 Neighborhoods the new trail will serve: 4
Residents within a ten-minute walk of The Bloomingdale: >100,000
Number of schools close to the new trail: 12
Length, in miles, of the historic freight line along Chicago’s Bloomingdale Avenue: 2.7
Length of time, in years, the line operated after its authorization by the city in 1872: 129
Height, in feet, of the Bloomingdale Line’s con- crete embankment: 18
Street-crossing viaducts along the line: 38
Street-level entry parks that will offer access to The Bloomingdale: 5
Estimated months remaining until The Bloomingdale opens: 24
Health and quality-of-life benefits of the new park and trail: Priceless
America’s Next Great Park
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