A new curving bridge bends toward justice
It spans Lake Shore Drive on south lakefront
The pedestrian span at 41st Street improves access to the south lakefront.
A buoyant pedestrian bridge on Chicago’s south lakefront isn’t a structural masterpiece, but it still brings to mind a famous line of Martin Luther King Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Dedicated in December by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and now nearly complete, the $33 million bridge, which spans Lake Shore Drive and the railroad tracks at 41st Street, flaunts tilting arches, curving railings and a deck shaped like a backward “S.”
But its most important curves aren’t literal. The bridge bends Chicago toward urban planning justice by opening a welcoming, at times scintillating path, to the shoreline from predominantly African-American neighborhoods to the west.
Two decades ago, Chicago had a separate and unequal lakefront.
To the north, Lincoln Park, lined by mostly white and affluent neighborhoods, was easy to reach and packed with amenities — a zoo, ample restaurants and restrooms, museums and more. In contrast, the South Side’s Burnham Park, rimmed by neighborhoods that were mostly poor and black, was a bleak and narrow expanse, littered with trash, broken glass and a shattered sea wall.
Burnham Park also was difficult to reach on foot or by bike because of the enormous barrier raised by Lake Shore Drive and the railroad tracks. Pedestrian bridges built in the 1930s— ugly, rickety and not accessible to people in wheelchairs — were better at repulsing people than encouraging them to cross.
In recent years, however, the Chicago Park District, the Chicago Department of Transportation and other public agencies have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Burnham Park.
They have created more parkland with new lake fill. And they have added a marina, fishing piers and beaches, and a handsome suspension bridge at 35th Street. The impact of these upgrades, especially the bridges, has woven this once-isolated stretch of the lakefront and the adjoining North Kenwood and Oakland neighborhoods into the fabric of daily life.
The bridges “bring more people into the community. There are so many people who thought this community never existed,” said longtime area activist Shirley Newsome, who lives a block from the 41st Street span.
To be sure, the improvements and the construction of attractive homes have not shielded North Kenwood from the gun violence that has plagued Chicago’s South and West sides. In 2013, for example, 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton was shot to death in a park in the 4400 block of South Oakenwald Avenue, three blocks south of the bridge’s site.
Still, the sight of cyclists and pedestrians crossing the nearly 1,500-foot-long 41st Street span suggests that things are slowly changing for the better. “It’s easy to just come outside and walk right across,” said Destiny Brown, 23, who lives in an eight-story building next door.
The bridge’s designers — John Clark of the Chicago office of Cordogan Clark & Associates and the Chicago office of AECOM, a global infrastructure specialist — were among the winners of a city-sponsored competition for lakefront bridges whose outcome was announced all the way back in 2005.
The need to wring funds out of Washington and Springfield delayed construction, angering residents and real estate developers who counted on the bridge to be finished sooner. A companion span at 43rd Street, also by Cordogan Clark and AECOM, only won approval from the Chicago Plan Commission on April 18 and isn’t expected to open until 2021.
The design of both bridges exemplified a reaction against the spectacular yet often-domineering bridges of Zurichbased architect engineer Santiago Calatrava.
In contrast to Calatrava’s “bridge as object” approach, which can be seen in a pedestrian span leading to his Milwaukee Museum of Art addition, the planned bridges promised to be neutral ribbons of concrete that would practically blend into the landscape. Renderings showed spans that echoed the gently curving walkways of the lakefront’s parks.
As built, the 41st Street Bridge both achieves and strays from this ideal.
The most obvious departure is the bridge’s color — a bright blue that was pretty much forced on the designers because it is one of two colors that the Chicago Department of Transportation, always concerned about ease of maintenance, uses to paint bridges. (The other color is burgundy.)
The blue can be rationalized as matching the blue of Lake Michigan, but it’s visually aggressive and verges on garish.
It also accentuates the awkward meeting of the bridge’s arches with the ground. An extra leg was needed to support the arches, resulting in a wish-bone-like arrangement that is both stubby and ill-proportioned.
Another problem is functional: Cyclists speeding down the bridge’s slope must sometimes screech to a halt when they encounter pedestrians, especially wayward children. Newsome has witnessed several near-misses.
Yet while the bridge has shortcomings as an object, it succeeds as a work of urban design and in elevating human experience.
The curving abutments leave ample room for a children’s playground on the city side and mature trees on the lake side. Stairs at the bends of the bridge’s reverse “S” curve allow pedestrians to cut directly across.
And that journey is a delight.
In contrast to the 1930s lakefront bridges, whose straight lines made the walk over Lake Shore Drive and the railroad tracks intimidating, the deck’s curves create the perception of shorter — and, thus more manageable — distances. The curves also lead you to wonder, as on a winding street, what’s coming up around the bend.
The procession culminates at the curving arches, which are tilted to create openness to the sky.
The arches and their steel cables frame spectacular views of the downtown skyline and the 41st Street Beach. Here, the bridge becomes a balcony, a belvedere, a viewing platform. It invites you to pause and ponder, taking a break from the business and busyness of everyday life. It thus becomes an extension of the leisurely landscape of the park, not just a route to it.
The designers deserve credit for small touches, like curving rail supports and light standards, that accentuate the overall design. And CDOT gets a tip of the hat for not cutting such details, as pennypinching bureaucrats are wont to do.
Landscaping, by Chicago’s Terry Guen Design Associates, is due to be installed in May.
Even in its unfinished state, however, the bridge can be pronounced a positive addition to the shoreline.
A bridge, it reminds us, can be much more than a way to get from point A to point B. It can invite shifts in the fate of neighborhoods, in our patterns of movement, and even perhaps in our region’s longstanding divisions of race and class.
The latter may take generations to change, but what better way than a bridge to both symbolize and effectuate the closing of that gap?