About a dozen of us met at the Aldi on Milwaukee near Leavitt last Saturday night. We quietly walked under the Blue Line tracks across the street, pushed aside some weedy overgrowth, and shimmied through a homeless sanctuary of shopping carts and dirty blankets that smelled like a zoo. I didn’t get the memo that said to wear long pants and sneakers–I was in coochie-cutter shorts and platform sandals. Tramping up a dirt trail in the dark, losing traction, I wondered what, exactly, I’d gotten myself into.
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Artists Max Reinhardt and Simon Slater, who call themselves Earthscraper–a play on skyscraper–led their friends and hangers-on like me down a mile-long stretch of the old Bloomingdale line, a three-mile strip of elevated track owned by Canadian Pacific Railway. Running from Ashland to Ridgeway on Bloomingdale, it hasn’t carried a train since 2000, and it’s become overgrown and clotted with garbage, but it’s still pretty. Reinhardt and Slater want the route to be turned into a park. The city seems to want that as well. In 2004 the planning commission adopted the Logan Square Open Space Plan, which includes a proposal for the Bloomingdale Trail, an elevated park and car-free route. The city has been bandying this about for years, but concerns over cost (an estimated $30 million) and crime–the racist notion that ne’er-do-wells will use the trail to travel from Humboldt Park to Bucktown, fear that people will throw bricks into buildings along the route, because of course there’s no other place from which to throw a brick into a building if that’s your thing–kept getting in the way.
Jeff Greenspan, a senior project manager with the Trust for Public Land, hopes “there will be funds in a year or so to develop the park. For the full line, we’re looking at several years down the road.”
It looked like a carnival game stand with junk food prizes, Capri Suns, cinnamon applesauce, chocolate pudding cups and mini boxes of cereal stuck in slots of wire fencing, Cheez-Its and Air Heads stapled to the rafters. Boxes of Irish Spring lined support beams. A Styrofoam cooler chilled cans of Kirkland soda and cheap beer. All the goods came from Costco. We were free to take what we liked but were asked to leave money on a stack of empty plastic pallets. I grabbed a grape soda and left a dollar.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Andrea Bauer.
