It wasn’t until last April that Cecilia Butler learned the state planned to close 12 access ramps on the stretch of the Dan Ryan that runs through the near south side. “I got a call from Maurice Lee, a reporter with the Hyde Park Herald,” says Butler, a longtime community activist. “He said, ‘Cecilia, did you know they’re taking away your exits?’ I said, ‘What? They’re just repaving them, aren’t they?’ That’s what everyone assumed. He said, ‘No, that’s not the information I just got.’ He said there’s a meeting in the community on May 9.”
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Butler wasn’t impressed. “I started thinking of all the people who would be set back by this,” she says. “There’s the businessman who runs the McDonald’s at 51st. What’s he going to do when people can’t get off to go there? We’re getting a new state-of-the-art fire station at 59th and State, about a block and a half east of the Dan Ryan. Don’t they want them to have direct access to the Ryan?”
She began calling other south-side activists, none of whom had heard about the plan either. “The state says they let the word out, but they didn’t tell anyone around here,” says Charles Stewart, a lifelong Englewood resident. “When Cecilia first told me, I said, ‘What? They’re walling us off from the rest of the city. They’re sacrificing the future of our community for easier access downtown for people riding on the Skyway–who don’t live in our area.’”
“One of the biggest failures of the plan is that IDOT does not recognize what is going on in the mid south side in terms of development and investment,” says Bernard Loyd, a planning engineer who lives near 44th and King Drive. “There will be an influx of residents as they transform the CHA properties. They’re spending $700 million to build new housing. But IDOT doesn’t account for that stuff. That’s just incredible–where’s the planning?”
The residents were shocked that Martin was shocked, given that race has been a major issue in south-side planning and politics since the race riots of 1919. After all, the Ryan had been put where it is in part to act as a wall between the mostly black public-housing projects and the white neighborhoods to the west.
“Isn’t that something?” says Butler. “Now they want to talk about things. They got themselves into a big mess, and they better figure out how to get out of it. We’re not going away.”
