POP’s attorneys are asking for a preliminary injunction to prevent roadwork, tree-clearing, and other “groundbreaking” activity scheduled to begin as soon as next month.
“This is a whole new ballgame,” legal scholar, professor (NYU; University of Chicago emeritus), and POP attorney Richard A. Epstein says about the motion for injunction and a new federal lawsuit, filed in April.
According to POP, the federal reviews had two fundamental flaws: first, they treated the OPC itself as a local matter, outside their purview (separating it from the roadwork it’ll necessitate); and then they failed in their duty to consider alternatives to the Jackson Park site that could be less harmful.
When the city was new, Lake Michigan lapped up much closer to Michigan Avenue than it does now. Downtown buildings regularly flooded; a breakwater was urgently needed. The city couldn’t afford this massive project, but the Illinois Central could. In return, in an agreement made in 1852, the railroad got the right to build its tracks (with a 300-foot right of way) along the shore from 22nd Street to 12th, continuing from there to Randolph Street on a trestle to be built in the lake itself. Then, in 1869, in spite of vociferous public protest, the IC wrangled passage of a state law that gave it ownership of “over a thousand acres” of land stretching a mile into the lake, where it planned to build a large outer harbor.
