Image courtesy of The Trust for Public Land
Image credit: Joshua Lott, courtesy of The Trust for Public Land
Image credit: Joshua Lott, courtesy of The Trust for Public Land
Image credit: Adam Alexander, courtesy of The Trust for Public Land
The 606 Grand Opening
Image credit: Adam Alexander, courtesy of The Trust for Public Land
For a relatively new landscape typology, elevated rail parks are not short of claims about what they can do for cities. They provide an opportunity to add green space to dense urban settings, improve public health by offering more opportunities for exercise, enhance connections through fragmented communities with car-free routes, and celebrate historic industrial infrastructure.
Logan Square was identified in the late 2000s as one of Chicago’s most underserved neighbourhoods for open space, both in terms of accessibility and quantity. The area also had one of the highest number of children per acre found in the city – with most living in multi-family dwellings with no access to private garden space. The project to turn the abandoned Bloomingdale rail viaduct into a linear park was born as a response to these shortages. Featured in the City’s 2004 Logan Square Open Space Plan, the project soon generated strong community support both from the Logan Square area and the surrounding neighbourhoods.
The City of Chicago moved quickly on purchasing the land needed to provide access points to the future park. Wherever possible such purchases were designed to allow for ground-level pocket parks to be featured alongside the anticipated access ramp and help reduce the shortage in play space provision that needed to be addressed. With hindsight, this proved a critical move: “the project wouldn’t have happened in the way we know it today if we hadn’t secured the land for access points upfront, before we started designing. Had we waited for this, we would have lost the opportunity for the adjacent parks” explains Kathy Dickhut, Deputy Commissioner at the City of Chicago Department of Planning and Development. For this work, the City partnered with the Trust for Public Land (TPL), a non-profit organisation dedicated to creating parks and protecting land for people.