A proposal to rename a stretch of Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive is up for a vote in a City Council committee meeting Thursday.
The Chicago City Council Committee on Transportation will meet at 1 p.m. on Thursday to consider an ordinance to rename a portion of Lake Shore Drive as “Jean Baptiste Point du Sable Drive.”
The ordinance was initially introduced by 17th Ward Ald. David Moore and co-sponsored by several other Chicago City Council members to rename the iconic roadway after Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, who arrived in Chicago in 1790 and was likely the first permanent non-Native American settler of the area.
According to the language of the initial ordinance, proposed in 2019, Lake Shore Drive would be renamed “Jean Baptiste Point du Sable Drive” from Hollywood Boulevard, located in the city’s Edgewater neighborhood on the North Side, to the South 71st Street merge on the South Side.
Moore later agreed to limit the proposal to Outer Lake Shore Drive from Hollywood to 67th, just impacting the city’s harbors and not changing the addresses of businesses or residences along LSD.
Point du Sable arrived at the mouth of the Chicago River in 1790 and established a property near what is now Michigan Avenue. He sold his property in 1800, according to researchers, but the area where he settled is now marked by historic markers along the Chicago River.
If the roadway is renamed, it would be the second prominent street to be renamed in the city in recent years. Congress Parkway was recently re-christened as Ida B. Wells Drive after the famous journalist and activist who helped found the NAACP.