Construction work on the Cortland Street Bridge, which has been closed to vehicle traffic for more than a year, could be completed around the end of 2028, the Chicago Department of Transportation said Tuesday.
Department spokesperson Erica Schroeder said the timeline was “significantly shorter” than other approaches the city had considered to try to fix the historically significant but structurally challenged 124-year-old North Side bridge.
The commitment seems to have assuaged some concerns from North Side aldermen, who, frustrated by what seemed to be the indefinite closure of the historic bridge and the mess of resultant traffic in their wards, had proposed taking the unusual step of stripping the structure of its landmark designation in order to speed up the process of getting a functional bridge at Cortland Street.
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Members of the City Council’s zoning committee Tuesday deferred a vote on a measure that would have removed the city landmark status of the bridge, which is said to be the oldest example of Chicago’s iconic trunnion bascule bridge style.
Ald. Brian Hopkins, 2nd, said during Tuesday’s meeting that he had been assured by the CDOT that work on the bridge could be completed by the end of 2028.
“We asked the Department of Transportation to do everything possible to work within the current landmark designation,” said Hopkins, who added he was not giving up on the idea of repealing the landmark status in the future.
“We don’t want to interfere with the sensitivity of this moment, where CDOT is completing their scope of work, dealing with federal agencies who may not be in favor” of the removal of the designation, he said as he moved to defer a vote on the ordinance.
When CDOT first closed the bridge to vehicles last year, officials estimated the bridge would be closed for two years at most.
But this summer, the department said it had discovered the bridge was actually in worse shape than previously thought.
CDOT suggested at the time that fixing the bridge could take a year-and-a-half to two years of construction alone — not counting design work or state or federal review processes. Hopkins said Tuesday he had been told previously that fixing the bridge could take as long as five years.
Schroeder said CDOT had “developed an alternative rehabilitation approach that can be completed under the existing construction contract while maintaining the bridge’s historic character and addressing structural conditions identified during bridge assessments.”
Actual construction work is expected to begin by the end of this year and would last about two years once it starts, she said. The new timeline is “significantly shorter than other alternatives that would have required restarting design and environmental and historic-preservation review,” she said.
The City Council has not repealed the status of a city landmark since the 1980s, when the McCarthy Building was stripped of its historic status to pave the way for the Block 37 development downtown.
Preservation advocates have railed against the possibility of the city taking such action again, arguing the move could be a slippery slope that would threaten Chicago’s rich architectural heritage.
And CDOT had warned this summer that removing the bridge’s landmark status would not, in fact, allow the city to immediately replace it.
Because Illinois has designated Chicago’s bascule bridges as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, the project would still be subject to certain state and federal environmental and historic preservation reviews, even if its city historical status was revoked, CDOT said.
Hopkins acknowledged that wrinkle Tuesday, saying the “issue is much more complicated than it appears at the surface,” he said.
Hopkins and fellow North Side aldermen Scott Waguespack, 32nd, and Timmy Knudsen, 43rd, had sponsored the measure set to go before the zoning committee on Tuesday.
While the bridge is closed to city buses — causing a circuitous reroute of the #73 CTA bus — and to cars, it is open to cyclists and pedestrians.
Some cyclists have rejoiced at the bridge’s lack of cars.
One idea proposed has been to keep the bridge open to pedestrian and bike traffic and build an adjoining bridge, or nearby bridge, for cars.
But CDOT has more or less poured cold water on that idea, saying this summer it would require “multiple years of right-of-way negotiations as well as design and construction.”
The Cortland Street Bridge is one of three North Side bridges currently closed to vehicle traffic, the others being at Lake Street downtown and at Chicago Avenue on the Near North Side.
Earlier this year, aldermen at their wits’ end with concurrent bridge closures and the traffic disasters left in their wake passed an ordinance requiring CDOT to notify the City Council and brief its members on any bridge closures slated to last more than a month.