Today, Lake Shore Drive is under attack by Lake Michigan, which this year rose to a level approaching its all-time high. The group has since disappeared from the public discourse, its website and phone number gone dead. “We take the most precious piece of property in the city and devote it to eight lanes of automotive traffic,” organizer Michael Burton told the Reader. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have it devoted to parkland? Wouldn’t that increase the value of adjacent property? Wouldn’t that make the city more livable? Aren’t we always looking for ways to scale back pollution?”Īt the time, the cyclists were regarded as pastoralist cranks, using aesthetic and environmentalist arguments to promote an agenda that would inconvenience hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans. They said that an eight-lane highway separating the people of Chicago from Lake Michigan violated Daniel Burnham’s dictum that the shoreline remain “forever free and clear.” Their goal: to take a jackhammer to Lake Shore Drive and restore it to grassy parkland. Back in 2001, a group of cyclists organized the Campaign for a Free and Clear Lakefront.
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