Talk about a lousy way to spend your birthday. On Labor Day, Stephanie Reid was biking along the lakefront to 12th Street Beach, where she planned to meet up with friends to celebrate turning 30. Near Adler Planetarium she wiped out on a patch of slippery, algae-covered concrete, winding up with a broken arm, a dislocated shoulder, and some nasty road rash. Now she’s calling on the Chicago Park District to take steps to prevent similar mishaps—or worse—from happening to other folks.
Riding on that stretch on Labor Day, Reid detoured around some people on foot to a damp area of the promenade. “It looked like it was just wet, but it was actually coated with algae, which wasn’t really visible,” she recalls. “My bike came out from under me and I skidded across the concrete.” She came to a stop a foot from the water’s edge. “What if I’d fallen the other way and ended up in the lake with a broken arm?”
“When he went to the lifeguards at the beach for a Band-Aid, they were like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ve heard about other crashes at that spot,’” Reid says. “That’s the thing that gets me.” Macaluso sent her a photo of his injury the next day; his elbow had swollen to the size of a baseball.
When I visited the revetment at sunset that evening, waves were indeed spilling onto the concrete, creating a hazardous situation for cyclists. I found some slick traces of algae, but there were also spiral marks on the promenade that might have been left by a machine used to scrub the promenade. (Maxey-Faulkner didn’t respond to an e-mail with a photo asking for confirmation of this.)
