Next week, the City Council could vote to rename Lake Shore Drive in honor of Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the Haitian-born trader known as the founder of Chicago. Though the move hit a parliamentary roadblock at last month’s meeting, council members supporting it say they have the votes.
As a student of Chicago history in general and transportation history in particular, I’m neutral on the subject of whether to rename the drive.
Lake Shore Drive is certainly descriptive — it’s a drive along the lakeshore. It’s familiar and has its own song.
DuSable Drive would be a unique name, and an appropriate way to honor the region’s history, since Black Americans have played such a major part in building Chicago. It’s also alliterative, though the initials don’t allow for the jokey drug reference provided by “LSD.”
I think the real issue with the drive is more basic: Why do we have a high-speed, eight-lane highway next to the city’s most valuable natural public asset —— Lake Michigan and its jeweled string of lakefront parks? Why do we have pedestrians and cyclists in often tight quarters on narrow lakefront paths, when polluting, mostly single-passenger cars take up so much valuable scenic real estate, and occasionally crash through barriers into a park?
It didn’t start this way. Lake Shore Drive originated with tycoon Potter Palmer, who got the city to build a street next to his lakefront “castle.” The Palmer-era drive was intended for leisurely strolls and carriage rides, so early Chicagoans could get some air and show off their outfits.
Motor traffic came gradually, as cars stopped being toys for the rich and became available to ordinary people. The road was extended north from Belmont Avenue to Foster Avenue in the 1930s, and then to Hollywood Avenue in the 1950s. The south end, which extends to Marquette Drive and Jeffery Boulevard, was originally named for the Norse explorer Leif Erikson — road names do change.
Lake Shore Drive bans trucks and is not supposed to be high-speed — the speed limit is 40 mph on the North Side and 45 mph on the South, but you and I and everyone we know goes faster when we can. An Illinois Department of Transportation study found that up to 95% of drivers exceed the limit when the road is not congested.
In other parts of the country, urban highways are getting torn down when cities decide something better is needed. Rochester and Syracuse in New York and Detroit are replacing stretches of interstate with more walkable, connected neighborhoods.
Could Chicago and Illinois do the same with Lake Shore Drive — by converting it to something on a more human scale? How about slimming it down to four lanes, with a lane in each direction dedicated to express buses? Express buses on two lanes could carry the same number of people up and down the city as cars on six lanes, but more efficiently and with less pollution. The speed limit could be 30 mph, with speed cameras to make it stick. Then some of that reclaimed space could go to expanding the park.
Reducing the Outer Drive’s footprint also would prepare for the increasing difficulty of maintaining it, with the prospect of shifting lake levels and stormier weather caused by climate change.
Some park users have proposed jackhammering the whole thing, in the style of Meigs Field airport’s demise. This is tempting but may be impractical, considering that the drive is a good transit route and provides public access to the lake.
The Illinois Department of Transportation and city planners are studying how to revamp North Lake Shore Drive. The agencies are seeking input on the project and want to pick a “preferred alternative” by the end of the year. This could include reducing lanes north of Irving Park Road and creating transit-only lanes and/or toll lanes.
But the “purpose and need” statement for the drive, drafted in 2014 and required to qualify for federal funding, envisions improving all modes of transportation, which means not cutting the number of cars, according to Audrey Wennink, transportation director for the Metropolitan Planning Council. Radically reducing the drive would require a different statement, Wennink said.
This might be a good idea, Wennink said. “Even eight years later, we’re much more aware of transportation’s impact on the environment, so this project has a very outdated premise.”
Years ago, waterfronts were used for industrial, commercial purposes, with roads and railroads and warehouses. “Now, we’re thinking differently about those assets,” Wennink said.
In this time of new transportation thinking and climate change, naming a motorway after someone isn’t such an honor anymore. Considering all that Jane Byrne did to help expand the CTA, it’s ironic that we salute the city’s first woman mayor by giving her name to the Jane Byrne Interchange, with its snarled traffic and years of construction.
If we want to honor DuSable, we shouldn’t do it with an outdated, asphalt mistake. We could honor him with a cleaner, less destructive way of traveling along our beautiful shore.
Mary Wisniewski is a Chicago writer and the author of “Algren: A Life.”
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