Mile 83: Forest Park
First visit: Dec. 7, 2022 Public trail? Not really Private land? Yes Distance walked: 2.5 miles
The Des Plaines River serves as a serene backdrop to seven cemeteries along its banks, beginning up north in Libertyville at the Serbian Orthodox Monastery of St. Sava, and including three in Forest Park, all of which border the Des Plaines River on one side and Des Plaines Ave. on the other. Cemeteries in fact line the river from Madison Street on the north to Cermak Road on the south, comprising virtually the entire length of the town, which lends credence to the claim that Forest Park has more dead people than living.
Except for a fifty-yard stretch of the Illinois Prairie Path, which bisects the Concordia Cemetery near the CTA’s Blue Line terminal, it turns out cemeteries are pretty much the only way to walk the Des Plaines River in Forest Park. To that end, I was able to walk more than two miles along the river’s banks by doing what an increasing number of Americans seem to be doing for exercise: walking through cemeteries.
Seeing Forest Park’s cemeteries on foot
Concordia Cemetery, bordered on the north by Madison Street and on the south by the Eisenhower Expressway, was founded in 1872, and is the final resting place for many victims of 1915’s Eastland Disaster, a boating accident on the Chicago River that claimed an astounding 844 lives. (By comparison, 1,500 lives were lost on the Titanic.) The outing had been for employees of the Western Electric Co., many of whom were German, Polish, Bohemian and Lithuanian, and the headstones here reflect this ethnic concentration. Walking through the cemetery, I came across an abandoned brick building whose provenance isn’t immediately evident, but where someone looks to have set up several beehives in relative isolation near the riverbank.
South of the Eisenhower Expressway the river flows right through the center of Forest Home Cemetery, notable for the Haymarket Martyrs’ Monument in its eastern section just off Des Plaines Ave. I was able to walk the river’s muddy east bank for most of the length of Forest Home but couldn’t cross to the west bank because the cemetery’s pedestrian bridge was closed for repairs. Which was just as well, because on the east side I was able to see the stately Grunow mausoleum, guarded by two cement lions reminiscent of the ones in front of Chicago’s Art Institute. In fact, during the Chicago Bears’ historic run to Super Bowl XX in 1985, a giant Bears helmet was stolen off one of the lions at the Art Institute and later recovered here, in this cemetery.
Continuing south and crossing Roosevelt Road, the river flows behind a succession of small Jewish cemeteries, one of which houses the grave of Michael Todd, Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband. Taylor was reported to have visited the site each year on the anniversary of his death. These Jewish cemeteries are collectively known as Waldheim, and as with Concordia and Forest Home, it is possible to view and walk the river there, though the east riverbank is basically crumbling from erosion. I was able to get better pictures of this by going off trail at Miller Meadow, a Cook County Forest Preserve on the other side of the river.
The final viewable point on the river in Forest Park is Schuth’s Grove and Canoe Landing, at the corner of Des Plaines Ave. and Cermak Rd. This is a very nice launch promoting the use of drainage-friendly pavement, and although there are no formal trails here, it is possible to walk the river bank a short way north towards the cemeteries and south towards Cermak. The views are arguably more interesting from the other side of the river here, where you can see headstones from some of the cemeteries practically tumbling down into the water, but this requires going off trail in Miller Meadow, and all the risks to person and nature that entails.
For all of the town’s various attractions, including its popular bars, restaurants and shops, as well as the 16 Inch Softball Hall of Fame (the game is as unique to Chicago as Italian beef), it’s the cemeteries many people think of when they think of Forest Park. They in fact served as the inspiration for a book titled Des Plaines River Anthology: Historic Voices from the Graveyards of Forest Park. Published in 2013 by the Historical Society of Forest Park, it’s a collection of verse drawing from tombstone names of the famous and not-as-famous. Ernest Hemingway’s parents, for example, are given voice, as is “Hell’s Belle” Gunness, the most notorious female serial killer in U.S. history. You can buy a copy from Centuries and Sleuths in Forest Park.
Stormwater and urban runoff
While walking through Forest Home Cemetery in 2022 I also got a closeup view of a big construction project on the river’s west bank. This is IDOT (Illinois Dept. of Transportation) Pump Station No. 4, and is a reconstruction and expansion project, meant to improve flood control off I-90 in this area. This was a deceptively large project, factoring in an expected expansion of I-90 (that isn’t actually planned, but that’s a different story) and the potential for even worse flooding. Projected to cost $46 billion, and more than a year behind schedule, it also required the state to obtain an easement on the neighboring Forest Home Cemetery, on whose property this is apparently built.
IDOT Pump Station No. 4 serves a low-lying area of the Eisenhower Expressway and is one of many similar facilities I saw during my walks. These pumping stations basically collect and redirect runoff, mostly from roads, which are a kind of non-permeable pooling point for water running off all kinds of other non-permeable surfaces: roofs, sidewalks, parking lots, other roads. As best as I can determine, some of this water will be treated to some extent before it’s discharged into the Des Plaines or one of its connecting streams. Some of that treatment might take place right at or near the pumping station, while in other cases the water will travel surprisingly far to be treated, detouring first to the MWRD’s massive McCook Reservoir, then to the Stickney treatment facility, which is the largest in the world.
In other parts of this Des Plaines River fansite I discuss wastewater treatment and flooding, but for a moment I want to talk specifically about stormwater and runoff. As with wastewater, the process to remove, treat and discharge stormwater into the receiving stream has evolved over the years. So have regulations and responsible parties surrounding these processes, which can be broadly grouped into two simple buckets: public and private. In some cases, the jurisdictions seem convoluted to me, such as power plants and airports. And in many cases the agencies responsible for wastewater are also responsible for stormwater, but not always. Regardless, I’ve been told by the MWRD that all of them (in Illinois, at least) are subject to the same standards of discharge quality, and that the standards have become more rigorous over time.
The volume and nature of runoff
In terms of water volume, it’s debatable how much more water enters the Des Plaines River as storm runoff than would otherwise occur naturally. By that I mean that some amount of precipitation would enter the waterways anyway, and all we do is route it, or try to. This is a different scenario from wastewater, which would not be present at all in the river if not for us. But while stormwater occurs naturally, and may eventually have found its way to the river, the fact is that by paving over much of the river’s watershed (it’s called watershed for a reason), we direct an almost unfathomable amount of runoff into our urban waterways that no longer has anywhere else to go, the consequences of which leads to floods, of course, and evermore complex feats of engineering, like Chicago’s Deep Tunnel (see more about that here).
The extent to which it is treated and cleaned before discharge is important, because it isn’t just water entering our sewers. Imagine everything that might go down the drain during a heavy rain or a major thaw: salt, oil, antifreeze, fertilizer, plastic bags and other litter, pet refuse, tree limbs, dead animals, etc. In Cook County, which still uses combined sewers (wastewater and stormwater in the same system), the MWRD says that every public sewer line is now routed to one of its seven treatment facilities, subjecting stormwater to the same treatment as wastewater.
That may be true for sewer lines, but plenty of direct storm runoff still reaches the Des Plaines, and during particularly heavy rains or thaws even the sewers themselves still discharge directly into the river. Some of this sewer discharge might be limited to stormwater, but in Cook County, where the watershed has been largely paved over, the antiquated sewer system receives a combination of both stormwater and wastewater, which gets routed directly into the river during extreme weather events. I’ve seen lots of these so-called Combined Sewer Outfalls (CSO; read more about that here) during my hikes, and felt vague unease by the warning signs posted nearby.
Despite the direct discharge, and even despite instances of CSO, the situation for the river in 2024 is very different than it was even just a decade ago. By almost every measure the river’s overall water quality has improved, enough to spur the return of many fish and other aquatic species, marine mammals and waterfowl previously driven away by the effects of pollution. I’m not so naïve as to think that we’ve solved the problem of toxic runoff, mainly because I know it still occurs. But the re-engineered sewer scheme, which includes the MWRD’s TARP network, does seem to be effective.