OAKLAND — Work has begun in earnest on the new 35th Street bike and pedestrian bridge over Lake Shore Drive, with completion now expected in a year.
"It's gonna be a full year, a little bit more than that to do the full bridge," Ald. Will Burns (4th) said this week. "I think it will be really a sort of signature icon as you come to the South Side."
The $23 million project has been in the works for a decade, since John Hillman and Teng and Associates won a design competition with their vision of a 620-foot, curving, single-cable bridge, suspended from a giant A-shaped tower rising above Lake Shore Drive.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel touted its arrival last summer along with Burns and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
According to Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey, work actually began last fall with the removal of part of the old bridge and renovation of streets and sidewalks leading to and from the area. In April, lanes were closed on Lake Shore Drive to allow beams to be set for a temporary steel frame for the bridge.
Those beams now extend across the drive, while the rickety old bridge has yet to be fully removed.
Burns said it was the first of three planned bridge reconstructions that will dramatically alter the access South Siders have to the lakefront. Work on the 41st Street pedestrian bridge is slated to start next year, and the city is in talks to purchase church property that will accommodate disabled access to the remade 43rd Street bridge after that.
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