Wicker Park and Bucktown — and the Bloomingdale Trail that runs through the two bustling neighborhoods — are ready to welcome summer with four new murals that celebrate warmer weather.
A new mural at the Milwaukee Avenue entrance to the trail was inspired by artist Ramiro Huizar’s 5- and 6-year-old daughters and their shared love for riding bicycles and scooters together.
“They love being on their scooters,” says Huizar, who noted his 6-year-old has now graduated to her bicycle. He has ridden the Bloomingdale Trail, also known as “the 606,” for years, since before the girls were born.
“When I was younger I would bike it downtown in the middle of the night,” says Huizar, who goes by the artist name “Ramiro.” He tried to evoke that sensation with the mural, stars winking in the sky and orange lights shining up and down from buildings and streetlights guiding the path’s direction.
Across Milwaukee Avenue is a new mural from the Chicago artist known as Sentrock, whose “Bloom” mural uses shades of the Chicago flag’s red, white and blue, along with peach, to evoke Lake Michigan, flowers springing up, birds soaring, bricks, cardinals and the train that once ran on tracks that traveled the Bloomingdale Trail.
These are the first two of 12 murals that will eventually stretch along the embankments of the trail, which opened in 2015.
“We’re trying to fill that space in as much as we can, from now to as far as we can go,” says Zissou Tasseff-Elenkoff, owner and curator at All Star Press, which is coordinating the murals. He hopes to turn the embankment into its own destination for mural lovers. “It’s been a fun project so far. We’re trying to keep it going.”
Along with the Bloomingdale Trail murals, two new murals in Bucktown and Wicker Park welcome residents and visitors to the West Side neighborhoods.
In Wicker Park, artist Andrew Jesernig painted a mural celebrating the neighborhood, also in Chicago flag red, white and blue, near the corner of North Milwaukee Avenue and North Honore Street. He based it off the old “Welcome to….” postcards, with big letters in the middle of the image and “the rest of the illustration surrounding it,” he said.
Those images include the Blue Line, the Wicker Park fountain and the intersection of North Milwaukee and North Damen avenues, along with a Chicago skyline.
Jesernig lived in Wicker Park for four years before moving to his current home in River West, he said. For this mural, he “wanted to make sure it was a big welcoming image for people who are visiting the neighborhood for the first time.” So despite living there previously, he wandered the neighborhood with fresh eyes and gathered inspiration to include in the mural.
Finally, Geneva artist Christopher Hungerman painted his “Bucktown” mural at 1945 N. Damen Ave. with purple letters on a pink background, with daisies, milkweed, irises, zinnias and more blooming above the neighborhood’s name.
Hungerman called the image “the most mellow mural I’ve ever painted.”
It was his first time painting flowers this big, he says, but won’t be his last. He enjoyed it so much that he is planning more floral murals this year and a solo show next year featuring flowers.