The parks built on top of a freeway in Oak Park

Drive I-696 through Oak Park and three times in barely a mile the sky closes over you. The freeway dives into what feels like a short tunnel, then bursts back into daylight. Those aren’t tunnels. They’re parks — full landscaped plazas, each about 700 feet wide, built as bridges right over the top of the sunken highway, with grass and playgrounds and walking paths on the lid while traffic roars along underneath.

They exist because of a fight, and a fair one. When the route for I-696 was being settled in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it was going to slice straight through the heart of Oak Park’s Orthodox Jewish neighborhood — a tight, walkable community of homes, synagogues, schools, and kosher shops. For families who don’t drive on the Sabbath and other holy days, a freeway trench would have been a wall, cutting people off from the synagogues they walk to on foot. The community pushed back hard.

The state listened. Final approval of the freeway’s path in 1981 came with mitigation built in, and Michigan even hired a rabbi to consult on the design. The answer was to deck the freeway over in three places, turning the barrier back into connected ground. The plazas knit the neighborhood together again, and on Saturday mornings you can watch families crossing them on foot, high above the cars, exactly as intended.

Decades on, the state is still tending them. In 2023 the Michigan Department of Transportation won a $21.7 million federal “Reconnecting Communities” grant to rebuild the aging Church Street plaza bridge over Victoria Park — money aimed squarely at keeping that pedestrian link alive. It’s a rare thing to stand in a quiet park, hear the muffled freeway under your shoes, and realize the whole green space is there so people can keep walking to prayer.