Quote: Ohio highway cap at forefront of urban design trend; retail complex atop Columbus expressway offers model for Chicago

COLUMBUS, Ohio — As they stroll between two buildings that echo the grandeur of Daniel Burnham’s demolished Union Station here, pedestrians can easily forget that they are walking over a bridge that spans a sunken interstate highway.

But that’s what happens at the retail complex called the Cap at Union Station (left), where the classically styled buildings flank what looks like — but isn’t — a typical city street.

The innovative project, which opened in 2004, put Columbus at the forefront of a national trend: Covering sunken freeways with caps, decks, land bridges or lids, as they are called, and using the found space to reconnect neighborhoods that were torn apart by the national highway building binge of the 1950s and 1960s.

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The Split Fix should be doing more of this.