December 2018 - Parks & Recreation - 53

than the High Line did. " Hammond,
co-founder of the Friends of the High
Line with David, says, " The High
Line sometimes gets too much credit - and blame - for what has happened around the trail in Chelsea and
the Meatpacking District. Gentrification was already taking place. It was
very hard for us to argue that we were
going to be as successful as we were,
especially considering we were just
coming out of a major recession. "
Hammond cites an important lesson
they learned in the early days of the
High Line: " Once value was created,
we learned that it is almost impossible
to take it back. When your project is
going to result in economic success,
you must have a way to capture that
value and return it to the city to allocate that value for all. "
Today, the most important considerations for large urban park projects include much more than their
potential for enhancing economic
development. " Historically, large urban parks were a spur for economic
development, especially real estate, "
says Benepe, " but now, many other
factors have come into play, including
resilience, community health impacts,
community cohesion, climate change
response and, especially, social equity. Parks can no longer be looked at
in isolation, " he asserts. " We must be
much more careful in looking at the
consequences of decisions, both intended and unintended. Parks must
be a force for public good. We must
look at how urban parks can maximize public health, community cohesion and resilience. "

heavy rail line as a linear park. The
planning and construction of the
Bloomingdale Trail, a 2.7-mile-long
park was announced in 2011 by
Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who declared that he wanted to ride his bike
along the completed trail by the end
of his first term in office. From the
outset, the trail, also called The 606,
was on a fast track, and the city and
the Chicago Park District, in partnership with the nonprofit Trust for
Public Land, were spurred by the
mayor's interest and commitment.
Ben Helphand, co-founder and
current president of the Friends
of the Bloomingdale Trail, says
that equity was a motivating force
from the beginning and that this
desire came from the community
members, because they wanted the
trail for the people who live there.
" That is what pushed us and that is
what motivates me today. This trail
is about community health and social cohesion, not about real estate
speculation. "
However, events were happening
that were largely out of the con-

trol of the Friends and even the
city at the time the trail planning
was underway. Helphand says no
one could foresee that there would
be such a rapid recovery from the
Great Recession and that the influx
of capital would be rapidly followed
by gentrification. " In the aftermath
of the recession, we were just trying
to keep the project alive. That was
our reality. I wish we had more foresight and were more proactive, but
it was really difficult to untangle the
forces at work, " he says.
" The communities on the west
end of the trail were reeling from
the effects of the foreclosure crisis, " says Caroline O'Boyle, TPL's
director of programs and partnerships for The 606. " There was
a great fear that property values
would not come back up. There
certainly was not much worry
about runaway inflation of home
prices or gentrification at that
point in time. "
O'Boyle notes that the trail was
planned and built in just four years.
" However, shortly before the trail

The Bloomingdale Trail, part of the Chicago Park
District's planned The 606 trail, runs 2.7 miles
through N.W. Chicago and is the longest elevated
railway trail conversion in the United States.

The Bloomingdale Trail
Awareness of social equity
impacts grew rapidly as the
Chicago trail project came online.
In Chicago, community-driven desire for more parks led to plans for
reuse of an abandoned, elevated
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Parks & Recreation

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December 2018 - Parks & Recreation

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