With work on the major water, sewer and streetscape project on Oak Park Avenue in the Hemingway District delayed by freezing temperatures, we’re going back into our notes from a recent interview with Oak Park’s village engineer and the project manager hired by Oak Park to oversee the project.
Here are a handful of sidebars on the project:
Can’t raise the bridge so they’re lowering the road: Have you ever been delayed on Oak Park Avenue when a too-tall truck shreds its lid by ramming into the Green Line el bridge? It has been a regular occurrence over the decades and even the day before our mid-January conversation.
Bill McKenna, Oak Park’s village engineer, said that as part of the project crews will dig out the current roadway under the bridge and lower the road by 6 or 7 inches. He’d like it to be more but said going deeper might weaken the foundation walls of the CTA/Metra/freight tracks running over the bridge.
This will result, he said, “in a few less vehicle strikes” but will not fully solve the problem.
What’s a vaulted sidewalk?: When you are working in a business district with more than century old commercial buildings you might run into vaulted sidewalks. These are sidewalks with open space beneath them once used for fuel deliveries into buildings, or to house mechanical systems. Such sidewalks exist outside the Scoville Square Building and the Billy Bricks building at Lake Street and Oak Park Avenue.
The vaulted sidewalks create both a legal tangle over easements and an engineering challenge to either create a structure to support the new sidewalks or to fill in the spaces. Negotiations continue with building owners.
The village solved this problem during major streetscaping in Downtown Oak Park a few years ago with vaulted sidewalks just outside the Marshall Field’s/soon-to-be Barnes & Noble building.
So long Bradford Pears: A harbinger of spring for the past 40 years have been the blossoming Bradford Pear trees on the 100 block of South Oak Park Avenue. All those trees will come down soon as part of this project.
Not long after they were planted, village staff concluded they were the wrong trees in the wrong place. They grew too big, there wasn’t adequate space for their roots. New trees will be planted though as the project moves forward.
