Big Marsh

Once an industrial site that was used by steel mills for slag dumping since the late 1800s, Big Marsh opened as a public park in 2016.

With a unique goal of ecologically restoring the 278-acre site, the Chicago Park District is also providing recreation opportunities at Big Marsh including hiking, adventure courses, and off-road biking. The eco-recreation elements are located primarily on existing slag fields where plants have a hard time growing and good habitat creation is unlikely. Other acreage is reserved for more passive recreation including bird-watching and nature walking. Environmental remediation is continuing in some areas of the park.

As a subconsultant to Hitchcock Design Group, EDI provided topographic surveying services for the first phase of this high-profile park’s redevelopment. These services involved integrating ground topography, cross sections and utility investigation with existing Cook County LiDAR surveys, which were converted from GIS shape files to AutoCAD Civil 3D. These were in turn used for engineering design for the first phase by the rest of the design team.