A few years ago, after returning from weeks of walking the hills, coastal paths and streets of the United Kingdom, I decided that if you can walk out of London, then you can walk out of Chicago. So, I took off from my apartment on the Far North Side and walked 63 miles, along the lakefront, through neighborhoods on the South Side, into industrial Indiana, until I made it to one of Chicagoans’ favorite refuges for hiking, the Indiana Dunes. Mile by mile, my perception and appreciation of the human and natural history of this metropolis were forever transformed.
Walking has become something of a national phenomenon since the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of people out of claustrophobia discovered the simple pleasures and profound effects of experiencing the world around them on foot. No longer perceived as the exercise of the retiring, we’ve learned that walking for 30 minutes a day, especially out-of-doors, benefits just about every aspect of the functioning human body — from the heart to the lungs to the brain. Walking boosts energy and immune function, strengthens muscles, bones and joints, and reduces depression, weight and the risk of Type 2 diabetes. Even our creativity, according to new studies, is enhanced by strolls into the streets and parks.
But in my experience crisscrossing the city since my trek to Indiana, walking not only has a positive effect on our mental and physical health, but it can affect the social and environmental health of our city as well.
Urban theorist Jane Jacobs, in her classic book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” recognized over 60 years ago that the vitality of cities depended on how frequently and organically its citizens interacted. Encounters on sidewalks, in parks, and at local shops and cafes, for Jacobs, were critical to the social and economic health of a city. Cities could then foster these interactions in their planning or thwart them. She warned cities such as Chicago and New York that the building of massive expressways and so-called “urban renewal” projects would fracture communities and destroy others altogether. And she was right.
On my long walks in Chicago, from north to south, east to west, what strikes me again and again are the sharp divides that still plague this city. From one neighborhood to the other, the differences are shocking and disturbing. In cars on an expressway, the social and environmental inequalities can be ignored, but on foot, one must confront the effects on people’s lives of decades of neglect, of degraded infrastructure, of living near expressways, railyards and polluting industries. Not to mention the lack of access to healthy food and nearby recreational spaces.
With greenways, trails and bike paths, cities are beginning to realize the need to sew communities back together, park to park, neighborhood to neighborhood, and in the case of northwest Indiana, with its half-built Marquette Greenway, city to city. But we don’t have to wait for the next 606 to be built. We can walk ahead, exploring and connecting this metropolis with our feet.
Chicago, as its motto boasts, is a “City in a Garden,” but you have to get out on foot to experience it. Whether I am walking along the lake or the Chicago River, through cemeteries or brownfields, down streets or under expressways, the natural world is there, pushing up through the cracks, migrating overhead or thriving in community gardens. In my walks, the city’s grand parks are impressive, but it’s the individual acts of citizens and voluntary organizations that often lead the way. The phenomenal restoration of Montrose Beach and Bird Sanctuary is a good example. For years, nearby residents came to this isolated corner of the lakefront to take walks and find comfort in the solitude and often unkept beach and weedy woodland behind it. Along with birders, locals realized that with stewardship and some plantings of native grasses and trees, they could assist in the natural rewilding of this area. Twenty-five years later, Montrose is a true sanctuary for birds and people, and all along the lakefront, other restoration projects have followed.
Walking for long stretches in the city, your perception deepens, and often, rising from the very earth below your feet, a feeling emerges. Like a revelation, you can sense the layers of history held in the land. You look at the lake and imagine it as a mile-high glacier of ice. You recognize that the street you are on was once a trail used by Indigenous peoples centuries ago. And in brick buildings that you’ve passed scores of times before, you see monuments to the workers who built them. On foot, there are no boundaries in the land, no divides, nothing but the past and the potentiality of the future.
August is National Wellness Month, so in celebration, let’s walk and explore those streets and parks we’ve never set foot into, let’s make connections, forge new paths so as to sew our city together for others to follow. Let’s walk not only for our own well-being, but for the health of our neighbors far and near, and for the health of our city and the extraordinary shore it is built upon.
Michael McColly, a Chicagoan, is the author of a new book, “Walking Chicago’s Coast: A 63-Mile Journey to the Indiana Dunes,” which will be published in September by Northern Illinois University Press. He also is a former instructor in the creative writing graduate program at Northwestern University.
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