Bronzeville Trail receives $900,000 grant for development of landscape design, study of rail history
When the idea of converting an abandoned rail line on the South Side into a 2-mile walking trail first emerged, so did a plan to study its history.
The Bronzeville Trail Task Force received a $900,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation that will allow the group to conduct pre-development and landscaping research and programs for the future trail.
The grant would allow the task force, which formed in 2020, to not only research landscape and design, but also to study the history of the abandoned Kenwood L embankment and the community that relied on it.
"As we did research on the rail line itself, we learned how it coincided with the Black migration history," said John Adams, founder of the task force. "There was a significant number of African Americans that lived in Chicago prior to World War I, who would get on the rail line and go to the stockyards and be hired for work."
The Kenwood rail line was built to help serve the Union Stock Yards, Chicago's meatpacking district, and community members would often ride it to get to work, Adams said.
"The meatpacking industry employed thousands of people," Adams said. "It was one of the foundations of Chicago becoming the great metropolis that it is today."
The Kenwood L line ceased operation in 1957. It ran south of 39th Street between Ashland Avenue and Halsted Street.
The trail, which would run along 40th and Dearborn streets to 41st Street and Lake Park Avenue, would also feature public art displayed along the route.
The task force partnered with Botanical City, an urban and landscape design firm, to develop urban policies and landscape strategies rooted in the specific history of Bronzeville and its residents.
"We're fortunate that Mellon saw the work we are doing to capture, document and tell the story," Adams said.
The goal of the task force is to create a trail for the South Side that will be like the North Side’s wildly used Bloomingdale Trail, popularly known as “The 606,” which opened in 2016.
The "rail-to-trail" project is expected to cost more than $100 million and could be completed in about six to seven years.
However, the construction of the trail was expected to "be more expensive than other trails due to the fact that a number of bridges will have to be reconstructed," Adams said.
Plans for the trail also include a monument built on its western end for Black cycling champion Marshall “Major” Taylor, who won a world championship in 1899 as well as two national sprint cycling titles in 1899 and 1900. He was the first African American sports hero and the first Black athlete to regularly compete in integrated competitions.