Jun
5
Right now the abandoned elevated rail line along Bloomingdale Ave. in northwest Chicago is frequented by restless teenagers and the occasional transient. But there’s a plan to transform the deteriorating tracks into a 3-mile paved bike trail with benches, lighting, and fencing. Check out the story and slideshow I did on it here.
I walked along the trail with Mike Scheitler, who lives nearby it. We climbed up over the bridge on Ashland and Bloomingdale Avenue and strolled for a couple of hours. I was shocked by what he told me.
He said that a year ago, the abandoned railroad was over run with trees and wild grasses. It was a real jungle, he said. To be walking down it, knowing you hadn’t left Chicago– it was like falling down the rabbit hole, he said.
But all that was left for us on that day was stubby grasses and occasionally a tangle of skinny, dead tree branches.
We walked a little ways in silence, the two of us. Me, asking myself, is this a place I’d want to come back to, by myself, to feel at peace and get lost in my own thoughts?
No, I thought. It’s depressing. Gloomy. Even in daylight.
The wonderland Mike described to me was gone.
And the way bureaucrats move, the park won’t be a reality for another ten years. I got that from Brian Steele, spokesman for the Chicago Department of Transportation.
So who cut down the trees and wild grasses?
I tried contacting Canadian Pacific Railroad to see if they come through to raze it once a year or something. But the trees Mike described to me, they couldn’t have been less than decades old.
The federal Surface Transportation Board has to decide the railroad is truly abandoned before consenting to the city’s acquisition of the property. But what more obvious way to show it has been abandoned than to have the roots of ancient trees intertwined with the old wooden tracks?
And if Canadian Pacific didn’t cut the trees, who did? Even taking my little walk on it was trespassing. I had no right to be there, nor does anyone else. And who would go to the expense of having those trees and foliage cleared if they don’t even have a stake in the property?
If you know anything, write me.