In mid-April the Chicagoland Bicycle Federation organized an unusual field trip. The nonprofit bike-advocacy group flew community leaders and a couple city officials to Guadalajara, Mexico, for the weekend to see the Via Recreativa, seven miles of major thoroughfares that are closed every Sunday morning to let bikers, joggers, skaters–anyone on the move without a motor–take over the streets.
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Sadowsky says the idea was easy to sell to the mayor’s office, the Park District, the Department of Transportation, 35th Ward alderman Rey Colon (whose ward, encompassing much of Logan Square, ranked second to last in an audit of neighborhood open space in 2004), and the Logan Square Chamber of Commerce, whose executive director, Josh Deth, owns the bike-themed Handlebar restaurant, where bar stools are constructed from old rims and bike messengers get a discount. Since Sunday traffic on the boulevards was modest to begin with, and since it would continue to flow normally along intersecting streets–bikers and joggers would have to observe red lights and stop signs–the CBF’s proposal required little of the city beyond traffic control police at major intersections. CBF volunteers would regulate traffic at smaller cross streets. The chamber, according to Deth, was intrigued by the prospect of leisurely foot traffic from all over the city parading by the boulevards’ shops and restaurants.
Lucy Gomez, who represents the Logan Square Neighborhood Association on the Sunday Parkways planning committee, says food and music along the route could bring out the personalities of the neighborhoods it passes through. “We want local flavor, like when you go into Garfield Park you might experience young people performing hip-hop or stepping, or you go to Humboldt Park and they’re doing traditional plena dances, and in Little Village you might have cumbia dancing.”
Last year Gomez talked to pastors from some 20 other churches along the proposed route (which the CBF isn’t releasing to the public until it’s nailed down) and urged them to call Colon’s office. That’s when it quickly became clear that Sunday Parkways wasn’t about to happen. Then last month El Paso, Texas, introduced the El Paso Ciclovia–a monthlong pilot program from 7 to 11 AM each Sunday–and the race to be first was lost.
“It was a whole different city than the one it was when I grew up,” he says. “It is a great, great thing. There are literally thousands and thousands of people out in the street, cycling, jogging, skateboards, rollerblading. Churches are doing services on the street. They lent us bikes and we also got out there in the street.”
