Seeking to correct its failure to protect Chicago’s Northerly Island Park from surging lake waves, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in August will start a reconstruction of the lakefront park that eliminates a large chunk of a popular trail used by pedestrians, bikers and bird-watchers.
The removal of the trail’s eastern side, parts of which have collapsed from erosion caused by the waves, is sure to disappoint parkgoers who used the looping path. Chicago Park District officials said they had no choice but to go along with the project in light of changing climatic conditions.
“Given the high lake levels and major storm events we have experienced along the lake in recent years, this solution presented the most feasible solution at this time,” Michele Lemons, a district spokeswoman, wrote in an email.
The development suggests how rising lake levels, which already have submerged beaches along Lake Michigan, could leave a permanent impact on a coastline that millions of people use for recreation.
It also marks the latest chapter in the controversial saga of Northerly Island, a 91-acre peninsula that for decades was Meigs Field, a small lakefront airstrip.
In 2003, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley directed city backhoes to carve giant “X’s” into the airport’s north-south runway. Twelve years later, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel fulfilled Daley’s dream of turning the airport into a nature preserve.
Yet just months after the $9.7 million makeover, which put hills, a lagoon and the trail in place of the airport, a section of the loop had to be closed after Lake Michigan waves severely eroded the path’s soil and stone foundations.
The shuttered section, which accounts for roughly a third of the path’s mile-plus length, has officially remained off-limits since then, although some park users ignore signs and barriers meant to prevent them from using it.
A visit Tuesday revealed that the condition of the path, a 12-foot-wide concrete sidewalk, has worsened since last year.
More stretches of the trail have broken apart and jut diagonally into the air, making them difficult to walk on. The edges of some of the busted sections have slid into the park’s lagoon. High lake levels have apparently contributed to the damage.
“It floods. When the wind’s blowing from the northeast, it’s like a waterfall coming down here,” a biker on the trail said.
The reconstruction, scheduled to start in early August and be completed this fall, will cost about $750,000, according to Patrick Bray, a spokesman for the Army Corps’ Chicago district.
The federal share will be 65%, with the Park District picking up the balance.
In addition to removing the east section of the walkway, the project will install “armor stone” on the inner side of the existing row of rocks on the peninsula’s east side, Bray said.
It also will create a turnaround just east of a bridge on the island’s southern end, effectively turning the loop path into a cul-de-sac.
Juanita Irizarry, executive director of Friends of the Parks, an advocacy group, deplored the reduction of the path.
What will be lost, she said, is “the human access to the full beauty of the space, getting closer to the lake, and not being able to appreciate what was originally intended there.”
The disheveled state of the path stands in sharp contrast to the vision for Northerly Island Park that the Park District unveiled in 2010.
A “framework plan” for the park that was done by the firms SmithGroupJJR and Studio Gang — the latter headed by star Chicago architect Jeanne Gang — urged that the peninsula’s northern half become a concert venue and that its southern half be turned into a nature preserve with a variety of habitats.
Offshore reefs and barrier islands would frame an outer lagoon to the east of the peninsula and protect the lagoon and the peninsula from the lake’s pounding.
But when the Park District and the Army Corps got around to building the park a few years later, the reef and barrier islands plan was discarded on the grounds that it was too expensive. It would have cost about $40 million, or more than four times the project’s budget, the Army Corps’ Northerly Island project manager said last year.
Instead, the Army Corps stacked a long row of large rocks on the peninsula’s east side in what turned out to be a futile attempt to guard against the pounding of the lake.
SmithGroupJJR and Studio Gang were not involved in the plan’s implementation. A spokeswoman for Studio Gang expressed hope last year that the Army Corps and the Park District would revisit the coastal reef plan. But that doesn’t appear likely in the short run.
“That vision remains a long-term goal, though funding for that solution remains a challenge,” Lemons wrote in her email.
The Army Corps awarded a contract for the reconstruction in January to Fortis Networks, a Phoenix-based contractor, but the project was delayed by the presence on Northerly Island of “Hamilton: The Exhibition,” a U.S. history showcase that’s a spinoff of the acclaimed musical about the treasury secretary.
The Army Corps had to find an alternative route for construction trucks to get into the park, Bray said, so the trucks could avoid pedestrians using the path that leads to the Hamilton exhibition.
Bray also said that the reconstruction will use leftover stone blocks from a shoreline reconstruction project that previously replaced battered revetments along Lake Michigan.
The 2015 creation of the peninsula’s nature preserve was funded under the federal Great Lakes Fishery and Ecosystem Restoration program. The program seeks “the restoration of the fishery, ecosystem, and beneficial uses of the Great Lakes.” The walking path was an outgrowth of the project, not its prime purpose, Corps officials said last year.
“The path …. was originally developed to move heavy construction equipment through the project site as excavation was being done,” said Kirston Buczak, the Corps’ Northerly Island project manager. “It was a nicety that the path was left in place, potentially for maintenance, but also for public use. Its primary purpose is not recreation.”
This story has been updated. An earlier version, using information provided by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, incorrectly stated that the Northerly Island reconstruction will cost $10.8 million.
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