At a recent Lakefront Alliance meeting, members received an update on the transportation improvements included in the Grant Park Framework Plan.
With soon-to-be-completed Millennium Park on the north, mass music festivals in the middle and a booming museum/stadium campus to the south, channeling the ebb and flow of pedestrians safely through Grant Park is a challenge for the Chicago Park District.
Plans to make Chicago’s world-famous “front lawn” more walker-friendly were presented Wednesday, July 25, to the Lakefront Alliance, a coalition of private and municipal interests convened by MPC.
Bradley H. Winick, senior project manager at Harza Architects and Engineers, the Chicago Park District’s coordinator of the Grant Park Framework Plan, explained some of the park’s proposed modifications for managing foot and vehicle traffic in the area – especially in and around Columbus Drive.
The plan, Winick said, is to move the park’s many festivals, beginning with Taste of Chicago, from the Petrillo Music Shell area to the southern end of the park between Balbo and Roosevelt. This will relieve downtown congestion created by closing off so many of the streets just east of the Loop.
“It is conceivable that all major east-west streets would be open” all the time, speeding traffic between the Loop and Lake Shore Drive, Winick said.
The various festivals force the closing of parts of Columbus Drive and east-west side streets around 39 times every year, he added.
Parking modifications discussed included removing all street parking on Columbus “so it can more properly work as a multi-use space rather than a street that occasionally gets transformed,” and increasing affordable short-term off-street parking.
The park district could also experiment with closing all or portions of Grant Park to cars during weekends and increasing the number of pedestrian crossing points along Columbus, Winick said.
When completed, the Grant Park Framework Plan will serve as a coordination tool for the city so the park’s development would have some overarching structure.
The Chicago Park District began working on the Grant Park Framework Plan in October, 2000. It could be approved by the Chicago Plan Commission as early as October, 2001.