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Originally Posted by Busy Bee
I admittedly haven't followed the OPL thread super close over the years but am stoked it's finally coming together. I am curious though, what exactly is the point to closing off 57th like they are planning? I don't really get what that has to do with the library.
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They're not closing 57th, they're closing Cornell. If you exit LSD at 57th, you won't be able to zoom around MSI onto Cornell like now. You'll have to sit at a stoplight at the Midway/5900S and turn left onto Stony Island, and then sit through 4 additional stoplights in front of the Obama Center and Hyde Park Academy and a stop sign at 64th before getting to the "superhighway" part of Stony south of Marquette. So you can still exit at 57th to go south, it'll just be a lot slower to go that way than to take the new route via Hayes. More importantly, the new widened Stony Island will have full curb bumpouts, landscaped median, signalized crosswalks etc so it is friendly for pedestrians to cross and access the whole of the park.
What keeps getting forgotten here is that all the roadway changes south of Hayes are not for the Obama Center, but for the privatized mega-golf course that the Park District is planning. Somehow the golf course has not riled up activists because it's not a building, even though it's far more of a problem for gentrification than the Obama Center is. The course that they're building is intended to be expensive and exclusive, unlike the public courses that exist now.
