The City Wants Your Help Planning The Future Of Chicago's Riverfronts

By Gwendolyn Purdom in News on May 11, 2016 7:19PM

With the expanding downtown Riverwalk drawing crowds, and riverfront boathouses popping up on the South Side, the city is asking for the public's help envisioning the future for other stretches of Chicago rivers.

Great Rivers Chicago, a partnership between the Metropolitan Planning Council, the city, the Friends of the Chicago River and others, will host a public meeting tonight at the Dunning Library in Belmont Heights to get feedback on evolving plans for bettering the DesPlaines River. The event is the second in a series of four such meetings to collect neighborhood insight as the group outlines a vision for the DesPlaines River and the city’s other two rivers, the Chicago and the Calumet.

The downtown Riverwalk improvements, along with talk of other big changes in store for the Chicago riverfront in recent months, have helped spread the idea that the rivers and riverfronts could be the city's next frontier for recreation and commerce, according to Josh Ellis, the Metropolitan Planning Council’s director and the Great Rivers project lead. Tonight’s meeting, Ellis says, will get that ball rolling even further.

“This has awoken some of the imagination of the people," he said. "If we can have that kind of experience downtown, why don’t we have a comparable experience...with the rivers in the rest of the neighborhoods?"

The biggest priorities the group has heard from the public so far, Ellis says, have been a desire for better access and signage; for a wider range of recreational activities; for aesthetic and odor improvements; and for more economic opportunities.

“The rivers connect and pass through far more neighborhoods than the lakefront does,” Ellis said. “So it’s an equity issue as much as anything else.”

Once the group has gathered more specific input from residents near all three rivers, a comprehensive document will be released in print and online this summer. From there, Great Rivers plans to meet certain milestones in 2020, 2030 and 2040, starting with drawing more attention to the rivers with signs and interconnected transit to make sure these initial riverfront upgrades don’t lose steam.

“If that’s happening in your neighborhood, you see it and you’re conscious of it,” Ellis said. “If it’s not happening in your neighborhood, the rivers are still, I think, in the back of the mind for a lot of folks.”

Tonight's meeting starts at 6 p.m. RSVP here.