In response to multiple attempts over the past decade to build private facilities on Chicago’s protected lakefront, nonprofit advocacy group Preservation Chicago says it hopes to pursue a National Park designation for the city’s waterfront and accompanying parks to protect them from development.
“It seems like every few years we have to go through these costly battles to keep Chicago’s lakefront and lakefront parks forever open, clear, and free,” Ward Miller, executive director of Preservation Chicago, told Curbed Chicago—evoking the wording of the Public Trust Doctrine, which protects the lakefront from commercial uses. “This [proposal] takes local politics out the equation.”