Tag: Big Marsh

Lake Calumet had a lot more water surface area 50 years ago

November 9, 2024 / / 0 Comments

I visited Big Marsh Bike Park with a friend three weekends ago to ride mountain bikes on the single track, check out the park’s campsite, see if people were still drag racing on Stony Island Avenue (they were), and finally, try to get a sense of where the access trail from Pullman in the west will cross over Lake Calumet by viewing the “land bridge” from the air.

According to the “preferred alignment” map below, the future bike trail will cross the lake at the shortest opening where the spit is on the left. The photo is facing due west.

While researching the proposed multi-use trail, boardwalk, and bridge, I decided to look up historic aerial photos to try and understand when and where the land around the lake was filled in. (I think the Illinois International Port District is the proposer.)

Renderings and map by Epstein.

The Lake Calumet diptych I made shows two aerial photos – taken from airplanes – of Lake Calumet in 1970 and 1995. The images come from the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning’s collection of three decades of 6,300 aerial photos across the six country region.

In the 1995 image you can see the Harborside International Golf Center built on landfill (also in 1995), additional slips for ships, and other land and water feature additions and subtractions.

The two photographs were taken slightly offset from each other but I scaled and adjusted their alignments to match each other as best as I could.

Big Marsh Bike Park is the coolest new city park

November 6, 2016 / / 7 Comments

Big Marsh Bike Park opening day from Steven Vance on Vimeo.

Rahm Emanuel has opened a lot of cool new parks – Maggie Daley, Northerly Island, 606, and Grant Park Skate Park – since he became mayor. (Making arguments that the parking lot south of Soldier Field can’t be anything but a parking lot pretty lame.)

This morning Emanuel cut the ribbon on the Big Marsh Bike Park, first announced in July 2014. It’s still known as Park 564, until the Chicago Park District board adopts a new name.

It’s located at 11599 S. Stony Island Ave. in the South Deering community area in an area already known as Big Marsh. I mapped the park into OpenStreetMap based on a map from the architect, Hitchcock Design Group*.

I've traced an architect's map of the park into OpenStreetMap.

I’ve traced an architect’s map of the park into OpenStreetMap.

The single-track trails, terrain park, and pump track, are free and open to the public every day from dawn until dusk. It resembles the Valmont Bike Park in Boulder Colorado, which I visited in 2014.

Big Marsh was listed in the city’s Habitat Directory in 2005, noting, “Big Marsh is the largest individual wetland in the Calumet Open Space Reserve with approximately 90 acres of open water. Hiking and biking trails and canoe launch are ideas for this area in the future. As of this writing, the site is undeveloped.”

A map of the Big Marsh wetland in 2005 in the City of Chicago's Habitat Directory.

A map of the Big Marsh wetland in 2005 in the City of Chicago’s Habitat Directory. The bike park is mainly in the cleared space east of the #2 on the map.

The area is also part of the the State of Illinois’s Millennium Reserve program, a group of projects to restore natural areas, create new economic development opportunities in the area, and build more recreational sites.

There is no bike infrastructure to access the site, and many roads leading to the site are in bad condition, or have high-speed car traffic. There is a large car parking lot at the site.

* If you would like to help me map the bike park into OpenStreetMap, you can load the architect’s map of the site into JOSM using this WMS tile layer.

Panorama of the bike park, and the landfill to its south

Panorama of the central plaza of Big Marsh Bike Park.

A rider on the terrain park small trail