Will you ever call Lake Shore Drive the DuSable Drive?
There's a road I'd like to tell you about, lives in my home town
Lake Shore Drive the road is called and it'll take you up or down
Lake Shore Drive goes back to 1882. It's the road that connects the north side to the south side, along the lakefront. Among the places you can get to easily on LSD includes Wrigley Field, Lincoln Park Zoo, Buckingham Fountain, The Museum Campus, McCormick Place, Soldier Field, and the Museum of Science and Industry.
When you're cruising on Lake Shore Drive, you have Lake Michigan to the East and pieces of Chicago's great Architecture to the West. A ten-minute ride on the CTA 146 bus makes you look at the city like a tourist, even if you've lived here for decades and taken the ride hundreds of times.
Lake Shore Drive is one of the most beautiful roads in the United States.
Lately, there's been a call to change the name of LSD. Many people want the road renamed to honor Jean Baptiste Point DuSable. Considered the "Founder of Chicago", he is regarded as the first permanent non-Indigenous settler of what would later become Chicago. Among the things already named for DuSable include a school, museum, park, harbor and a bridge.
Yesterday, Chicago's city council was scheduled to vote on the renaming of Lake Shore Drive. Two aldermen teamed up to temporarily block the vote. They'll revisit this at the next meeting in June. There's enough support for the change that it looks like it will eventually pass.
But, my question is will you ever call it the DuSable Drive? Let's take a look at other places that have had a name change:
For many years, Sears Tower was the tallest building in the world. It had that name from 1974 until 2009. When the insurance broker, the Willis Group leased three floors in the tower, naming rights to the building came with the lease. For the last twelve years, the building has been known as Willis Tower. I know people who work there that still call it Sears. When tourists come to Chicago and want to go to a sky deck high above the city, they say they want to go to Sears Tower. It'll probably take another couple of generations before the Willis name sticks....probably.
The Chicago White Sox played baseball at Comiskey Park for eighty-one years. In 1991, they moved across the street from the old ball park into what they called new Comiskey Park. In 2003, U.S. Cellular cut a $68 million deal with the Sox for naming rights. Comiskey became U.S. Cellular Field and kept that name until the 2017 season, when Guaranteed Rate acquired the naming rights. When White Sox fans talk about going to a home baseball game are they referring to the stadium as 'The Rate?' Does that even make sense? NO!!! They're going to Comiskey!
Lake Shore Drive has been around twice as long as my last two examples. If people can't adjust to new names for relatively new places, how will they possibly adjust for a new name to a road that has had the same name for one hundred and forty years? The answer is they can't and they won't! If I'm giving directions to someone to get to my house, the chances that I say 'get on the DuSable and get off at Belmont' are pretty close to zero percent. Hell, it is zero percent because I'll never say that...NEVER!!
For me it'll always be Lake Shore Drive because:
There ain't no road just like it
Anywhere I found
Running south on Lake Shore Drive heading into town
*lyrics from "Lake Shore Drive" by Aliotta, Haynes & Jeremiah
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