From the ground the trail didn’t look like much—a few miles of dank, crumbling cement held together by graffiti. But from above it was a magic highway. A thin strip of rough, scrubby green easily accessed at strategic points along a poorly maintained fence line, the Bloomingdale Trail gave sanctuary to drinkers, dog walkers, joggers, junkies, and anyone seeking shelter from the streets below. It was an interstitial wilderness, opportunistic plants holding tight to rocky soil, and for much of this century’s first decade, it was Chicago’s best-kept open secret.
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These days the weeds are gone. In August 2013 the city broke ground on construction of a long-planned network of parks and trails along the railway that’s now called the 606—after the three numbers all Chicago zip codes share in common. Said name change—enacted after much focus-grouping and brand consultation by the consortium of agencies charged with developing the park—seems to have succeeded in offending few, and pleasing fewer, but on the street it doesn’t matter. Everyone still calls it the Bloomingdale Trail anyway.
No matter what you call it, it’s set to open in its first phase in 2015, after more than ten years of grassroots organizing and prep. Now that the city’s taken charge the project is moving full steam ahead. BUILDING A NEW CHICAGO, declare the signs dangling from its bridges, and I’ve watched over the last nine months as small trucks and front-end loaders zip back and forth along the viaduct past my second-story windows. On the ground, the bright murals that marked the passage from Humboldt Park to Logan Square—whose neighborhood boundary the trail passively polices—have been sandblasted away in the name of lead abatement. The quiet man who lived underneath the overpass all last summer has moved on. If you trespass on the tracks these days you’ll get a ticket.
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In 1995 I was homeless in Chicago, sleeping on the floor of a friend’s loft at Grand and Wood. I spent hours each day, those first weeks, adrift in a strange town, drinking coffee at the old Wishbone on Grand and poring over the Reader classifieds looking for a job, an apartment, a map, a clue.
In the afternoons I walked the streets of greater Wicker Park—Grand to North; Ashland to Western—building a muscle memory of Chicago’s geography with every step. I didn’t go west of Western on my own back then. Back then, to a newbie, west of Western was the wild unknown, best approached only with a trusted guide.
One night we threw a party. My friends were moving out of the loft, moving on, and I needed to as well. We posted a sign in the kitchen, bold black Sharpie on butcher paper: MARTHA NEEDS A PLACE TO LIVE. It was a party with intention, at which I had to introduce myself to strangers over and over until one of them stuck. I moved into Carla’s apartment at Augusta and Damen, the perfect center of my daily wanderings, two weeks later. Was the seed of my life in Chicago planted there intentionally or by accident? It’s unclear.
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For as long as there’ve been gardens, gardeners have pondered the epistemology of weeds.
Because a weed famously is defined by what it’s not. A weed is just a plant growing where it’s not wanted, right? A hardy plant with the tenacity to thrive, neglected, in inhospitable turf.
A weed competes for resources—for space, sunlight, and water—with more desirable, intentional plants. It provides shelter where pests can overwinter. Early-season weeds offer sustenance to sap-sucking aphids and other insects, enabling them to grow strong enough to attack your tomatoes when the time is right.
In the proper context a weed can be a tincture, or a tea, or the main ingredient in your pasta with wild ramp pesto. If it roots in the right place it can fix nitrogen in the soil or anchor unstable ground. In fact there’s a famous story that the first life to return to east London after the devastation of the Blitz came in the form of weeds. According to Richard Mabey, author of the book Weeds, by the end of the war, braken carpeted the nave of St. James Cathedral and ragwort scrambled up London Wall. The spread of the lowly rosebay willow herb was so thick and rapid it was welcomed with the nickname “bombweed.”
But what’s a weed on land no one cares about? In the loose taxonomy of common weeds, railway weeds are their own lowly category: tenacious, craven plants that have staked a claim to the roughest, most embattled turf around. Yarrow and curly dock. Prostrate pigweed, Russian pigweed, rough and smooth. Spotted knapweed, hoary cress, western goat’s beard, and toothed spurge. They all have names and properties, but in the ledger of urban improvement count for nothing.
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Before construction started I walked the Bloomingdale Trail a lot, climbing the fence at Julia de Burgos Park over on Whipple and more often than not heading east. To the west, near where the tracks split at Ridgeway, vegetation gave way to a ground cover of small hostile rocks, and long-abandoned freight cars offered privacy for all manner of illicit human activities.
To the east, though, the path grew soft and lush, and where, from the street, the tracks seemed a dark mass of decaying concrete, from above they vibrated with the full flower of midsummer.
Accident or intention?
Seed or weed?
Which is better in the long run? Is it even possible to quantify their relative good? Intention builds bridges; accident coats them with rust. Intention drops bombs; accident turns the rubble green. Intention sows spinach; accident raises lamb’s quarters instead.
But, wait a minute. Weeds grow from seeds, same as radishes. Lamb’s quarters is just wild spinach. You can eat it, too, just as well.
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My friend Amy used to live on Monticello, just south of the trail, and she
