Activists want Ogden Avenue more people friendly
By Patrick Butler
What does Chicago’s West Side have in common with Paris, Copenhagen, and London?
Activists in all those places have been insisting that streets be designed for people, not just cars, said Marisa Novara of the Ogden Avenue Redesign Coordinating Committee (OARCC).
“The idea is to make Ogden Avenue a destination, not just a thoroughfare,” Novara noted at a recent forum sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the Metropolitan Planning Council.
Under a plan developed by a group of local residents, business owners, and other neighborhood stakeholders, Novara said, Ogden between California Avenue and Pulaski Road would be “reconfigured” and tidied up to promote pedestrian activity on what is now one of the widest streets in the city with four to six traffic lanes plus parking on each side and few trees.
“Some of the ‘footprints’ along Ogden aren’t conducive to the way a lot of people shop today,” said Novara, who sees the project as “not so much a commercial revitalization as a way to make the streets more livable” with public art, “street furniture” including benches and bus shelters, and natural gathering places in an area plagued by decades of unemployment and population decline.
For Novara, the need for such a project really hit home when one of the OARCC members said, “When I see people walking on Ogden, I think it’s just because they don’t have a car.”
“That’s exactly what we want to move away from,” said Novara, who represents the Lawndale Christian Development Corporation¾the lead agency in the Ogden Redesign project¾on the OARCC.
The first phase, to be reviewed by the City and returned to the OARCC by early next year, calls for wider parkways, landscaped medians, diagonal parking, landscaping, and plenty of trees.
The plans also call for developing a commercial and recreational hub at the “five corners” (Ogden//Cermak/Pulaski) intersection, a family entertainment center at Ogden and Springfield Avenues, playgrounds and athletic facilities on some vacant lots, and gateway community identifiers along Ogden.
The project’s cost and duration will not be known until it gets final approval, with part of the money to come from the New Communities Program, with matching funds from the federal government, Novara noted.
She added that reclaiming the street should attract visitors as well as residents of the 1,200 local housing units either planned or already under construction in the area.
Ogden’s revitalization is part of a citywide “placemaking” program endorsed by Mayor Richard M. Daley and acting Transportation Department Commissioner Cheri Heramb.
Fred Kent, founder of the Brooklyn-based Project for Public Spaces, said he has trained more than 2,000 traffic engineers in the kind of “context-sensitive solutions” to placemaking and community-impact assessment that locals are looking for on Ogden. It is the “village nuts” who foster change, said Kent in a complimentary manner, praising Daley as “the biggest village nut there is. They used to be very rare, but today it’s surprising to go into a city where there aren’t 200 or 300 ‘village nuts’ bent on improving their urban surroundings.”
People all over are starting to understand just how great their cities and neighborhoods can be, Kent said, and he noted they are willing to work at changing perceptions.
“For 70 years, we’ve designed our cities around cars,” Kent continued. “Now the question is how we can design our cities around people and leave the car largely out of the equation. Not completely emptying the cities of cars, but bringing the streets back to the context of people.”
Kent said he would not have been able to talk that way even ten years ago when everyone still assumed cities would go on being built around traffic patterns and parking lots.
“Parking, parking, parking is a mantra for people who have no other ideas,” said Kent. “If you build for cars and traffic, you’ll get cars and traffic. If you build for people, you’ll get more people. It’s the 90-year-old woman and the nine-year-old kid you have to plan for.”
Which is not as difficult as it may sound, said Tom Samuels, a top aide to Alderman Mary Ann Smith (48th Ward). Pedestrian-friendly street planning is easy in Chicago, where every Alderman gets an annual discretionary “menu” of more than $1 million to spend on whatever ward improvements he or she considers most necessary. “It’s unique in the United States,” said Samuels. “Not only has the housing market skyrocketed [in the 48th Ward], but you can see that proverbial senior with the baby carriage walking along.”
Although reclaiming streets as places for people finally is happening, he said, “it’s not happening fast enough.”
