The 1800s

In a cruel twist of fate, the diagonal roads that were the lifeblood of Gladstone Park and the northwest farmlands in the mid-1800s were free game once they exited what was then the Chicago City limits. Like in frontier times, there were no laws regulating them. Anyone could buy them and treat them and the people who wanted to use them with impunity.

When local farmer-turned-businessman Amos J. Snell discovered the old Indian trails that merchants were traveling on were up for grabs, he bought N. Northwest Highway from the county in 1870, ripping out old planks and installing an even better roadbed of gravel. Then he charged tolls to pay for the improvements, according to Illinois Courts.gov. Somewhere along the way Snell also got ahold of the sometimes impassable byway we know now as N. Elston. Laying wood boards crosswise atop a log foundation spanning the mud pathway, he improved it to a plank road and also charged tolls. N. Milwaukee also came under his ownership and people began referring to it as the “Snell Toll Road,” according to Lee Diamond who gives bike tours of the area through ChicagoVelo.

Because Snell had a monopoly on all the major roads that led from the Gateway of Chicago into the city center, he gave northwestern farmers and merchants no choice but to pay whatever he wanted if they wanted to get their goods to market.

That much is known. What came next is murkier, especially since few well-regarded history sites weigh in on the matter.

Don Hayner and Tom McNamee of Streetwise Chicago place Snell back in the 1840s when he’d supposedly been charging the then outrageous fee of 2-1/2 cents per mile to travel from the center of the city along the 10 or so miles to the northwest. By then his tolls provided him with nearly $800 a day with fees collected at three locations on N. Elston alone: its southern entry point at W. Division Street (near Goose Island), at W. Lawrence, and at the northern end where it merged with N. Milwaukee in Gladstone Park.

Making it sound like a Laurel and Hardy slapstick routine, Hayner and McNamee describe rankled local farmers taking matters into their own hands by dressing up as Native Americans and staging their own “tea party.” Just like the Sons of Liberty had done nearly 70 years earlier when they’d thrown tea into Boston Harbor to protest British taxes, the malcontents supposedly chopped down and burned the tollbooths to try to set things straight. This story was repeated in comical terms all over the Internet.

But it seems the real tale may be darker and from a different decade altogether if you reference a more solid source. We catch up to Snell in 1888, by then a multimillionaire, when he was shot to death in his West Side home February 8 as reported in the next day’s Chicago Tribune as reprinted on chicagology. Calling the murder of the largest individual owner of real estate in the city the “most sensational ever committed in Chicago,” the Tribune documented it in excruciating detail.

Presumably the case was closed after the police arrested the family black sheep, William B. Tascott, as the suspected killer when he was on his deathbed at the Cape Nome Gold Diggings in Alaska in 1889. But in an unexpected twist 21 years later, James Gillan, labeled a “professional crook” by the December 4, 1910 The Inter Ocean Magazine, confessed on his deathbed that he, not Tascott, had killed Snell while burglarizing his home. But reflecting on how many enemies the hated murdered man had made — and the fact that Gillan had an accomplice he would not identify — some authorities still consider the case unsolved.

So, what has this got to do with tolls? Well, slightly more than two years after the millionaire was killed, those who had had to pay to travel on the only major routes that existed from the center city to the northwest where Gladstone Park lay revolted. Instead of it being a lark like the earlier version of the story, they reportedly killed the toll collector in the process of burning down his gate and toll booth, ChicagoVelo’s Diamond maintained.

The infamous Amos Snell, Chicago toll-collecting tycoon and millionaire real estate owner of over 350 buildings who was murdered in his own home in a case that many do not consider solved. Did it have anything to do with the road rebellion incident two years later where merchants, resentful of paying to travel the miles of roads he owned from the center city out to the Northwest area of the city, killed the toll collector and burned down his gate and booth? Drawing from chicagology.

This version of the story gains more credence if we read accounts from the Illinois Courts. For not more than a month later, Snell’s family tried to take over the toll roads the patriarch had owned and the Illinois Supreme Court ruled they had no authority to do so. The reason: they found Snell could not legally pass the right to collect tolls to his heirs. The family appealed, taking the case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court which, in 1894, upheld the state’s decision.

Finally the roads Gladstonians know as N. Northwest Highway, N. Milwaukee, and N. Elston were free!

The 1950s/1960s

It was the new 17.8 mile superhighway Chicago proposed constructing through the city in the 1950s in the desire for a new southeast-northwest artery that that sparked the community’s second incident of road rebellion. Placement promised to eviscerate whole Northwest Side neighborhoods, cutting apart commercial corridors and sawing residential areas in two. Chicagoans were prepared to fight after having already been beaten back by the 1949-1961 construction of the Eisenhower Expressway (Rt. 290), which had displaced some 13,000 people and 400 businesses as it ran straight west out of the Loop into the suburbs, according to WBEZ 91.5 Chicago.

While many residents conceded the traffic-choked city needed more roadways to handle increasing numbers of cars, those who lived in areas of the city where the superhighway was to be constructed were not happy. Sure, it would be handy to have a new road (later named the John F. Kennedy Expressway or Rt. 90) linking the Loop to O’Hare Airport. But Polish Downtown was to be cut in half like a knife, throwing residents out of their homes and disrupting their network of churches, businesses, and neighborhood groups. And the road was to continue cutting through the southern part of Jefferson Park to where it would veer west near W. Foster. While the planned route would spare Gladstone Park directly, its impact would not be benign. For it would isolate the small northern neighborhood from the Jefferson Park commercial hub centered on W. Lawrence to its south.

Further resentment arose when Illinois proposed making the Kennedy into a toll road, evoking history from nearly 100 years earlier. The situation was that, since the project had been on the drawing board for so long, the superhighway had run short on money when the time came to build it. That’s when some genius thought the only solution was to transfer the road to the Illinois Toll Highway Commission to allow it to collect tolls to pay for the expressway’s construction, according to sutori, a teaching source on the issue. As Yogi Berra used to say, it was deja vu all over again.

Map showing Kennedy Expressway traveling northwest through the middle of the Jefferson Park neighborhood, which is approximately square. The Gladstone Park community in the upper northwest quadrant would remain intact with the Kennedy veering just to its south and west, but much of it would be cut off from the greater Jefferson Park commercial hub centered around W. Lawrence to its south. Map from Google.

Residents, including Gladstonians, objected strenuously to paying for the privilege of driving on a road that 1) was ripping through part of their community and 2) they weren’t sure they even wanted. The protest that followed might have been more peaceful than that made against Amos Snell’s toll roads, but it was no less impactful. Joining other Chicago neighborhoods, the people pressured the state into passing the 1956 Interstate Highway Act that declared the Kennedy a free road, according to the Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago. Another travesty at least partly averted!

The 2000’s

It is unclear when Chicago city urban planners actively began promoting the “Complete Streets” program that required roadways to be designed and operated (or, in the case of existing streets, retrofitted) to be safer for all users and not just vehicular traffic. Theoretically, improvements would enhance the streets for everyone of all ages and abilities whether they were drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists or riders of public transportation.

The U.S. Congress had tried to mandate “Complete Streets” back in 2008 and 2009, but had failed to make the program law. However, the U.S. Department of Transportation endorsed the program in 2010 with a policy statement supporting streets that were convenient and comfortable for everyone to use. As federal funding is necessarily tied to policy, that’s where the action lay.

Perhaps the city had only been responding to Gladstonians’ perennial complaints about drivers on the four-lane N. Milwaukee routinely speeding through their community going 40 per hour or faster in a 30-mile zone, endangering residents. But when Chicago transportation engineers tried to solve the problem in 2014 by imposing its version of “Complete Streets” on N. Milwaukee–the main artery through Jefferson Park into Gladstone Park–the greater neighborhood and its sub-community squawked.

Most of the objections were against the city’s proposal to reduce the size of the roadway for car travel. The idea was that if two of N. Milwaukee’s four lanes were eliminated by expanding and relocating bike lanes, adding median strips and relocating street parking, drivers channeled into only one lane of traffic on each side of the road would slow down. Residents didn’t buy it. Especially as N. Milwaukee had long ago been expanded to a full 78 feet wide as it emerged out of the busier commercial hub of Jefferson Park to its south. There was plenty of room to maintain four lanes.

Around 600 people showed up at the cavernous Copernicus Center January 21, 2015 to protest the plan with another 4000 signing a petition against it, Brian Nadig of the local Nadig Newspapers reported. The so-called “road diet” just would not do.

Ultimately, the outcry led to the city settling for the least stringent of its three proposals, removing few parking spaces and leaving the bike lanes as is. Vehicular traffic would be able to use continuous left-turn lanes (technically a fifth lane) down N. Milwaukee’s center and travel more freely with improved coordination of traffic lights. Bus stops would be improved to make public transit easier. The major change would be beefing up and adding to a series of highly-visible widely-striped crosswalks across the neighborhood’s main business corridor, concentrating on intersections without traffic lights. This would be done by installing bumpout planting beds set off from the sidewalks to reduce the total distance pedestrians had to walk to get across the road. Walkers would be further aided by barrier-free pedestrian refuge islands in bricked medians (many with trees), giving them the opportunity to walk across two lanes of the busy road and stop safely in the middle before resuming their trips across to the other side.

With an eye roll and a shrug of the shoulders, Jeff and Gladstone Parkers begrudgingly accepted the plan to provide more safety for pedestrians who needed help crossing the busy street. They had saved their streets once again. Or at least they thought they did.

Curbed and bricked pedestrian refuge island in a treed median providing a safe place for people to stop in the middle of the road when using the new crosswalks. This refuge island, with steel bumped plates to make wheelchair users and those with low vision aware of their location, is opposite AutoZone Auto Parts, 5374 N. Milwaukee. Photo by Mina.

Unfortunately, grumbling about the eight N. Milwaukee crosswalks at major nontraffic-signaled locations has not abated since their construction. Many residents feel that while the refuge islands and “bumpouts” may have made crossings safer for pedestrians, they created new hazards for vehicles traveling the road. There have been repeated incidents of cars crashing into the medians, bending signs and taking down trees (not all of which are fixed or replaced in a timely manner). Other reports detail incidents in which cars have run up into the unmarked bumpouts and needed tows to get out, particularly in winter weather when the curbs around them aren’t visible in the snow. Other drivers complain about having their visibility of oncoming traffic impaired by too-tall plantings in the beds, weeds that actually hid pedestrians about to cross the road. And even while walkers praise the new medians for giving them a safe haven after crossing two lanes of traffic across the main business thoroughfare before traversing the other two lanes, everyone continually gripes about the appearance of the bumpouts. Store owners have expressed continual objections, especially when the planting beds in front of their concerns attract litter and weeds instead of enhancing the business district with natural shrubs and attractive wildflowers as promised.

When the city finished its “Complete Streets” renovation on N. Milwaukee between W. Foster and W. Devon in Gladstone Park, they left 14 six-foot by 10- to 12-foot soil-filled planting beds (the bumpouts) on the sides of the road where the eight new pedestrian crosswalks begin and end. Nine of the beds are contiguously curbed but physically separated from the sidewalks by about a foot, forming a runoff channel between them that gets clogged with debris. Five others have open ends with the drainage channels running through their middles, eroding out soil. While both types were initially planted with hardy ornamental grasses and tough native flowers geared to survive harsh roadside conditions, the soil-over-gravel medium in the beds, combined with the lack of any practical way to water them, made survival of any vegetation difficult. (The bumpouts further south of Gladstone Park between W. Foster and the Kennedy Expressway have similar issues, but are not discussed here because they are out of the community.)

Additionally complicating the situation is the fact that the top layer of soil from the curbed beds continually blows off due to wind from traveling cars. More soil washes out from the drains of the open beds. Salt gets thrown into them during winter snow plowing. When the initial plantings started dying, dandelions, tall invasive reeds and other noxious weeds more resistant to harsh conditions invaded, serving only to trap more of the endemic trash that blows down the highway. Garbage, leaves and dirt continually builds up in pavement around the planting beds that street cleaners cannot reach. Without regular upkeep–something the city has not supplied–the bumpouts are viewed by most as wholly unattractive and detrimental to the overall appearance of business corridor.

Unfortunately, CDOT never produced a plan to maintain the bumpouts after they were initially installed with vegetation dug into their planting beds. Apparently the hope was that business owners concerned about the outside appearance of their shops, offices and restaurants would contribute their own time and money to keep the beds attractive. Or maybe they thought community volunteers would buy new plants and risk their lives working in the beds while having no protection from vehicles of all types whizzing by within a foot of the busy road. With all the difficulties, only one shop owner took any care of one bed outside his building. Community members trying to work on the beds during the pandemic didn’t have much luck either, hobbled particularly by lack of water and soil that could support decent plant growth.

What it all boils down to is that the experimental bumpout design installed in Gladstone Park never fulfilled its hoped-for aims. Perhaps the City of Chicago went with the separate, more expansive planting beds on N. Milwaukee because they thought the less densely-developed neighborhood would benefit by having the opportunity to beautify the crossings along its commercial corridor. Or maybe they were trying to test an admittedly more environmentally-sound approach for stormwater management. For whatever reason, the city didn’t put in the standard reduced-size bulbouts that they were installing on many other Chicago streets in that needed crossing protection for pedestrians. These rounded curb extensions, bulbed-out like onions with paved and contiguous with adjacent sidewalks, have been much more readily accepted by the driving population.

Gladstonians are still trying to grapple with the N. Milwaukee renovations. In fact, the reason Gladstone Park Neighborhood Association formed in the first place was because the “Complete Streets” fallout made residents aware they needed to have a united, more formal voice about what was happening in their community, according to President Joe DiCiaula. The group is still hoping there is some way to improve the problematic curbside bumpout beds so they do not remain as littered, weedy, dangerous eyesores.

After photographing and documenting all the problems Gladstone Park was having with the ill-maintained bumpouts in the summer of 2021, representatives from the GP Neighborhood Association took Alderman Jim Gardiner (45th) on a walking tour to see them for himself. He submitted a request to Chicago’s DOT for an evaluation of the 14 planting bed bumpouts north of W. Foster under the department’s own “Complete Streets” reassessment guidelines.

On March 3, 2022 GPNA President Joe DiCiaula wrote in an email that that CDOT officials had told Gardiner they had seen no justification for evaluating the planting bed bumpouts installed seven years earlier. The reason the Department gave him for its denial was the estimated high cost ($250,000) to remove the “islands” at 5350-5400 N. Milwaukee, presumably referring to the three planting bed bumpouts on both sides of the SW Parkside Avenue crossing. Nothing was said about the remaining 11 bumpout planting beds at the other seven crosswalk locations.

GPNA found the response eminently dismaying because its main goal was NOT to have CDOT remove the bumpouts, which the citizens’ group acknowledges as functioning appropriately to provide protection to pedestrians in the crosswalks. The citizens’ group had instead suggested several alternate solutions to improve them, the first of which was to having the city DOT restore and maintain the bumpouts with appropriate soil, plants, watering and weeding support. Another possibility they raised was looking into the possibility of attaching the bumpouts to adjacent sidewalks where the beds could be grassed over and maintained more easily and attractively. A third choice might be to go for the kind of downtown redesign Highland Park endorsed in September, 2023 geared to improve the pedestrian experience and increase business vibrancy by repurposing its bumpouts as paved areas for outdoor use. Benches could be installed on them or the areas could even become outdoor dining space for local restaurants, as Highland Park proposed.

DiCiaula called GPNA’s quest to solve the problem of revising the planting bed bumpouts as “(obviously) a long time project.” Staff members of Ald. Gardiner who attended the neighborhood group’s meeting June 23, 2022 reiterated a willingness to take the problem back to his office for further strategizing. As of August, 2022, Gardiner’s aides communicated that Alderman was pursuing the original ideas GPNA proposed for CDOT to improve the bumpouts, hoping for a commitment from the city to make them into community assets rather than detriments. But nothing so far has happened.

Is it possible the neighborhood isn’t done with its road rebellions quite yet?

These four photographs show some of the problems created by the 14 planting beds installed by CDOT along N. Milwaukee Avenue in Gladstone Park as part of Chicago’s “Complete Streets” program. Functioning as “bumpouts,” they protect pedestrians at non-traffic lighted crosswalks by shortening the distance they have to walk across the street. But the native shrubs, ornamental grasses and wildflowers originally planted in the six-foot by 10- to 12-foot curbed and soil-filled cutouts have long disappeared, victims of the harsh conditions found along the thoroughfare. Wind continually blows off the top layers of soil, leaving only a gravelly substrate, while water washes more of the growing medium out from drains in open beds. There is no source of water when drought conditions exist. Salt from winter plows gets into the soil, making it inhospitable for all but the most invasive of weeds. Problems are compounded when passing cars whip up the garbage that continually swirls down the road, propelling it into the vegetation and into the pavement channels between the beds and the adjacent sidewalks that street cleaners cannot reach. Without regular upkeep or revision, which CDOT has not supplied, the bumpouts will continue to be viewed by Gladstone Parkers as wholly unattractive and detrimental to the appearance of the community’s business corridor.