Forest Park Review, March 16, 2022
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OPINION O U R
V I E W
Tri-village trifecta
W
ith federal infrastructure money slopping around like never before, here is the single, most obvious project that needs to get done. The railroad underpass at Harlem Avenue between North and South Boulevards is fully obsolete. The clearance is too low for many trucks. The lanes are too narrow for Harlem’s heavy traffic. The center support clogs up any traffic flow. And it is an absolute bottleneck at a critical juncture of three villages — Forest Park, River Forest and Oak Park. The obstacle, and the opportunity, for the fierce lobbying that must be done to gather in the estimated $30 million it will cost to fully reimagine and rebuild this underpass is that there are three villages determined to get it done. First proposed in 2008, the rebuild has never gotten past some initial engineering studies. And those studies make clear the complexity and the necessity of the work. Now Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins, River Forest President Cathy Adduci, and Oak Park President Vicki Scaman are unified in the effort and working with both state and federal legislators to secure the funds. This underpass is now 100 years old. Built originally to carry Chicago and Northwestern tracks over Harlem Avenue, it is now a workhorse carrying Metra and CTA commuter lines as well as the Union Pacific (UP) freight trains. It is Union Pacific that owns the underpass. In a typical cheapskate, offloading maneuver, an early hang-up in the planning discussions is that the UP does not want to own the underpass and does not want responsibility to maintain it once the work is done. A railroad that has clearly not invested a nickel in this vital piece of infrastructure over the course of a century should not get off scot-free when the real work gets done. With the president of the state senate, Don Harmon, and the speaker of the Illinois house, Chris Welch, living in or adjacent to our communities, and with Democratic senators representing Illinois, this is the moment to get this project funded and rebuilt.
Forest Park’s urban forest
Smart move by the Forest Park Village Council to seek a grant from the Morton Arboretum to undertake a full inventory of all the trees in the public way in the village. The arboretum would pay half of the roughly $20,000 cost of a professionally done audit. Creating a baseline of the number and location of trees, the variety of species, and the size and condition of those trees is an essential starting point for Forest Park’s continued investment in this great community asset. It is a progressive move by a Forest Park administration and council that is more ambitious in seeking out support for green initiatives. We are all in favor.
Waiting rooms and missing missed connections
Sat waiting in the empty doctor’s office last night and there was a single magazine in the waiting room. It was a real, honest to goodness magazine with pages that turn, bound with a narrow spine. It was the New York Times Book Review magazine supplement which gets printed and published weekly and inserted into the Times. Like a glove, I slipped into the act of waiting, sitting in the dedicated space reserved waiting. Magazine racks and tables were barren to prevent microbes from transmitting between readers, yet there was this single magazine, on a chair, calling to me. Turning and scanning pages of something as foreign to me as the latest books reviewed by NYT allowed me to take a brief trip far away from Ukraine, the Proviso schools and Jussie Smollett. After scanning each page, the classified section on the final page drew me in — ads for wrinkle creams, ghost writers for hire, French-English songwriter for hire and ads for companionship. The mostly sweet-sounding middle-aged romantics in New York or the Bay Area looking for a partner to share wine, theater, poetry and a dance in the living room had me lost in a daydream of other peoples’ lives. Struck by nostalgia, and an itch for the beauty of humanity, I took a chance to see if missed connections still existed locally. Indeed, Craigslist has a place for those who are desperately seeking interconnectedness. Missed connections, once a regular part of classified ads, are a personal ad that flashes a moment when there might
have been a missed relationship, a distinctive moment that someone is stuck reliving and wishing they would have reacted differently and, odds against them, they are seeking to reconnect. In case you haven’t checked, and you recently winked at someone at Menards in Melrose Park or if you were nice to someone at the Blue Line train in Oak Park, head over to the local missed connections on Craigslist, someone is looking for you. A little bit of hope, a flash of faith, even a nudge of anticipation. I was recently reminded of Winnie the Pooh’s take on anticipation. “‘Well,’ said Pooh, ‘what I like best,’ and then he had to stop and think. Because although eating honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what that was called.” The constant reminders of fear, mistrust and what is going wrong both locally, nationally, and globally sure make a jar of honey seem trivial and even suspicious. Watching egos clash globally and locally, and powers destroy the very things they want to protect-both globally and locally, and watching broken systems produce broken results-both globally and locally, sure, can take the wind out of anticipation. So for at least a moment every day, I am going to indulge in the trivial, the simple jar of honey, a crocus making its way out of the ground or a random act of kindness, just enough to replenish my faith in the interconnected and that magic that I do not want to miss.
JILL WAGNER
L E T T E R
No Park Forest Park An Open Letter to those who run Forest Park: If you want people to patronize the shops in your village, perhaps do something about all of the broken meters along Madison Street that won’t take change, so your only choice is pay the exorbitant 45-cent fee on a 25- to 50-cent parking cost, or use a CC, or stop ticketing people until they get fixed. It was pitiful enough that Forest Park decided to sink to the level of Oak Park and implement paid parking via the use of the inconvenience meters that are few and far between. When I called (the police department apparently) to report a broken meter, the answer I got was: “We’re aware they’re broken, we’re looking into it, we’re going to ticket you if you don’t feed the meter, we won’t give you a pass because the meter you must use is broken, go elsewhere to park.” And then they hung up. They literally told me to park elsewhere. Like where, Oak Park? I’m a customer and that response is unacceptable and will keep me from patronizing anyplace in Forest
Park until it’s warm enough to ride my bike as I refuse to put any more money into the police department or village coffers. If you’re wondering why people continue to shop online and aren’t coming back to the brick & mortar stores, you only need to look at the policy of your local police department. The meters were broken last July, but then the FPPD was responsive and sent out someone to look at it and asked me for my license plate. So this is a long running issue, which they don’t seem motivated to fix. Why fix a meter that’s collecting $0.25-$1 at a time, when you can just ticket unsuspecting customers and reap $25 or $30 or more in parking fees/customer? I feel sorry for your chamber of commerce members, who try and eke out a living during these challenging times in a “village” that seems to enjoy putting up road blocks to their customers. This is one customer who won’t be back.
Donna Oswald
