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The Kennedy Expressway cuts through the West Loop like a scar, dividing Union and Ogilvie Stations and the riverfront from Greektown and the new high-rise developments west of the highway. This moat-like effect, along with the destruction of the Maxwell Street neighborhood and the city fabric west of downtown, is the price we’ve paid to speed car traffic to and from the Loop. But it doesn’t have to stay this way forever.

The construction of Interstate 5 carved a path of destruction through Seattle in the 1960s, and even before it was finished local officials and activists were thinking about how to repair the gash. Using a combination of city, county, state and federal money, they constructed a five-acre cap on top of the freeway near downtown Seattle and built a park on top. Freeway Park, completed in 1976, reconnected the downtown financial district with the First Hill neighborhood to the west, easing passage between the two and raising property values. The park-over-expressway concept has inspired a number of other cities to cover up highway trenches, and Seattle even had another go at it in the nineties, constructing Sam Smith Park over a section of I-90.

Meanwhile, our own downtown stretch of I-90 would be a good candidate for a cap. There’s not much green space in the West Loop other than Union Park, a mile away, and the theoretical Kennedy Park (or whatever we’d call it) would be close to much of downtown. Right now visitors arriving by train step out of Union Station to find downtown two blocks to the east and a forbidding expressway barrier two blocks to the west; an expanse of landscaped greenery would help invite them over to the Greek restaurants stretching up and down Halsted. A roof would also protect the crucial high-traffic section of the expressway from the elements year-round.

Of course, covering up a highway isn’t cheap. A park deck currently being built in Dallas over the Woodall Rodgers Freeway is costing $100 million in public and private funds, which comes out to about $500 per square foot. And that’s not even considering cost overruns of the sort that plagued Millennium Park and Boston’s Big Dig, the giant construction project that buried I-93 under a park but cost more than twice as much as predicted. But a number of cities—including St. Louis, Washington, Los Angeles, and San Diego—are looking into or planning highway caps and finding ways to squeeze money out of the federal government and private funders. Here Millennium Park offers a positive example: About $200 million of its total $475 million price tag came from private donations, including the sale of naming rights. Capping the Kennedy could be funded the same way, and the Canal/Congress Tax Increment Financing (TIF) district could be expanded to include the highway, just like the Central Loop TIF was expanded to include Millennium Park. Aside from the permanently higher tax revenue, the project’s legacy would be a beautiful new park space and a reconnected West Loop. And who can put a price on that?