Street Signs & Traffic Lights
Because of the zaniness of veering roads, sharp-angled intersections, and odd-shaped lots, everybody who moves to Gladstone Park has to learn the ropes of how to negotiate the confusing patchwork of streets. Even so, residents who’ve lived here for years can inadvertently get turned around on local streets that travel diagonally one way into another before traversing in another weirdly slanted direction, leaving them befuddled about where they’re heading. Visitors looking for shortcuts, in particular, find themselves weaving around in circles until they can no longer tell whether they’re heading south, east, north or west. The city tries to help by making custom street signs with multiple road names pointing at different angles, all of which add a touch of intrigue, if not goofiness to the community.
Chicago’s had to get creative when erecting street signs in the Gladstone Park with so many roads veering off and merging at different angles as well as “broken” off by odd-shaped tracts of land. In this case the diagonal N. Elston directly meets W. Matson, which heads off at a different angle. The two streets below (N. McVicker and N. Meade) are “broken roads” that stem off N. Matson a few lots up from this intersection to where they both curve to meet N. Indian Road, which is also on the diagonal. (To get to the southern parts of N. McVicker and N. Meade, which are cut off by another rotated section of blocks about four blocks south across N Milwaukee as the crow flies, you’d have to make at least five turns on as many different roads.) Photo by Mina.
But instead of the community letting the perplexing road geography get them down, it flipped those difficulties into assets. Perhaps the best example is how Gladstone Park turned the challenging logistics produced by its two most formidable intersections into opportunities to create welcoming pocket parks within.
The first of these opportunities arose from the tangle of criss-crossing streets from where N. Northwest Highway and N. Milwaukee diverge out from each other at different angles and traverse over W. Foster at the very southern end of the community, necessitating a succession of traffic lights at each of four closely-linked corners. When the chaos spawned two tiny triangles of land in its center, the community — out of practicality or perhaps humor — made the conglomerate into its first Gateway Park.
After installing welcome signs and metal benches, they planted trees, flowers and groundcovers. In 2019 this eastern welcoming park became the location for the Volga public art installation that recognizes the Germans from Russia’s Volga River Valley who originally settled the area, building the barn-shaped “Dutch” Colonial houses for which the neighborhood was once widely known. A new Pace Pulse Bus Stop is on the N. Milwaukee side of this property. Drivers traveling north see the “Welcome to Gladstone Park” sign on the eastern park’s corner while drivers traveling south see a companion “Welcome to Jefferson Park” in the opposing western pocket park.
N. Milwaukee and N. Northway Highway form a “V” at the southern entrance to the Gladstone Park community to where they intersect at the cross created by W. Foster (a parallel road) and N. Central (a perpendicular road). There are four traffic lights on each successive corner, making this the trickiest and most confusing intersection in Gladstone Park. Yet the neighborhood was able to take advantage of challenging circumstances by making the two tiny green triangles that form the “hourglass” at the center into Gateway Welcome Parks. The one facing drivers going north reads “Welcome to Gladstone Park” while the one facing the opposite direction reads “Welcome to Jefferson Park.” (The brown track at the southwest is the Metra’s Union Pacific/Northwest Rail Line; the double blue byway below it is the Kennedy Expressway.) Map courtesy of Google Satellite View.
See more pictures of these pocket parks, including the Volga Art Installation in Schools, Parks, Churches, & Fraternal Organizations.
Likewise, an even more acutely-angled triangle formed by the merger of N. Milwaukee and N. Elston halfway north through the neighborhood became the second of the community’s tiny welcome parks. Renamed Chopin Park in 2014 to honor the Polish composer, it recognizes the contributions of the many Poles who settled in the area, as documented by Heather Cherone of dna info CHICAGO. It also boasts three flagpoles with American, Chicago and MIA flags. A tree-lighting ceremony in Chopin Plaza in December celebrates Christmas in Gladstone Park.
While it may be difficult for visitors to drive into and out of the community with its confusing sets of traffic lights at entry and exit points at W. Foster, N. Elston, N. Northwest Highway and W. Devon, there are only seven sets of stoplights to impede their movements once inside. Three of these are on N. Elston: one at the N. Austin intersection and two at its merger with N. Milwaukee. Another four are on N. Milwaukee: one at the intersection at Bryn Mawr and three at the tricky confluence where its diagonal path creates a triangle by successively crossing W. Ardmore and W. Austin (which conform to the parallel/perpendicular grid system).
Just be warned about this last: you’ll take your life in your hands if you think you can sail through the yellow at W. Ardmore and then make it through the second set of traffic lights at the differently-angled W. Austin just beyond. Likewise, virtually no one advocates willfully driving directly from one side of the community across the slanted N. Milwaukee to the other side without the benefit of a traffic light; too many of the connecting roads take jogs and don’t present straight paths. The City of Chicago itself has recognized the hazards of traversing N. Milwaukee at certain locations in the community by making one side or the other into one-way streets with “do not enter” signs, preventing crossings entirely at those places. The N. Marmora and W. Huntington intersections at N. Milwaukee are examples.
Traffic lights at the intersection where the diagonal N. Milwaukee crosses the parallel and perpendicular W. Ardmore and N. Austin in quick succession. If the first set of lights is yellow, do not think you can sail through it and the second set further down the road that is seen in the distant background. W Ardmore and N. Austin, which do conform to the grid system, themselves intersect slightly west of this point. Photo by Mina.
One of the features that has made Gladstone Park streets easier to live with is the fact that few of them are so narrow or heavily trafficked that the city has only felt forced to convert them into one-ways as it has had to do in greater numbers in neighborhoods south and east. Also, only a handful of residential roads are so congested or too near commercial enterprises that they have felt the need to institute permit parking.
But what Gladstonians most love to crow about is the fact there are none of the those parking meters Chicagoans love to hate in their community, making local shopping a relative breeze as well as less expensive.
While Chicago’s alley system and its parkways (vegetative strips of land between streets and sidewalks) also profoundly affect the functionality and beauty of Gladstone Park’s streets by redirecting service vehicles such as garbage trucks and car travel to the rear of houses, they are discussed in Vintage Home Living.