Forest Park continues to make headway on investing in its roads and the aging sewers and water mains beneath those roads. After decades with virtually no planning for its infrastructure and no reliable methods of paying for inevitable fixes to often century-old systems, the village has in recent years begun to work on a plan.
Right now, Forest Park is entering year two of a three-year plan. Further investments in rebuilding crumbling alleyways continue; water main updates and road resurfacing are the meat-and-potato upgrades expected in 2025.
Critical, though, will be the village’s further progress in implementing the state-mandated replacement of all lead water pipes in town. In 2024, the village started creating an inventory. This year, we will see the continued replacement of some of those pipes. This is expensive work with complicated methods of paying for the upgrades. But it is perhaps the most essential infrastructure project in Illinois and the nation at this moment.
Also on the agenda for 2025 will be a thorough engineering and cost study for how Forest Park can replace or move the water reservoir on Jackson. In a telling example of historically not facing up to its infrastructure issues, this critical reservoir has fully deteriorated and must now be replaced at what will be a steep cost. How to pay for it will be a huge challenge. And spinning off from this discussion will be planning for what happens to the adjacent and also deteriorating community center.
This will be a big, expensive and necessary discussion.
Good for the village government for facing up to these infrastructure realities.
Forest Park stories
One of Forest Park’s great emerging assets is the Arts Alliance. Its mission is boosting, discovering, organizing and promoting what had been wisps of diffuse arts energy in the village over recent years.
The volunteer group has worked to create a batch of channels for all sorts of local artists from visual to performing arts. This week, the Review’s Jessica Mordacq tells the wonderful story of Susan Rohde, a Forest Parker whose art is storytelling. During the COVID epidemic, Rohde signed up for a class with a Chicago storyteller who helped her understand how to shape short narratives.
Rohde has gone on to citywide storytelling events and, in December, had one of her stories broadcast on WBEZ’s Moth Radio Hour. She and friends gathered at St. Bernardine’s to listen to the show.
But in true Arts Alliance fashion, Rohde also brought the idea of a local Tellers Night to the group. It now meets monthly, September through May, at Robert’s Westside.
This is the energy that fuels itself while building an arts community, which has become core to Forest Park’s effervescence.