In the early 2000s the Hyde Park community succeeded (with then-Senator Obama’s help) in blocking a government plan to strip away the quarried step stones around Chicago’s Promontory Point and replace them with a new concrete-and-steel revetment. That important act of preservation incidentally saved the many stone carvings that reside on those blocks — several dozen of the thousands of the carvings that line Chicago’s waterfront. The concrete-and-steel approach to shoreline reconstruction was nonetheless applied from just north of Promontory Point up to Montrose Harbor. The “shoreline protection project” demolished several miles worth of the old step stones along with
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