The Way Back Down
It took six years to restore a small path to one of Lake Bluff’s most extraordinary places
When Janet Murphy Ryan returned to Lake Bluff in March 2020 after her Peace Corps service was cut short by COVID, one of the first places she went was the beach. What she found stopped her. The stairs leading into the beach prairie were barricaded. “That was like my baby,” Ryan remembers. Her attachment to that patch of Lake Bluff went back nearly four decades. In the early 1980s, Murphy Ryan was a young research scientist fresh out of college when she met Carolyn Goetz, founding president of the Lake Bluff Open Lands Association. She became involved with LBOLA and helped with the original beach prairie project, bringing children down for science and erosion projects and eventually helping plant and establish the area around the timber stairs and benches. There was a practical reason for all that planting. Native prairie plants do much of their important work where no one can see it. Their extensive root systems reach deep into the soil, helping hold it in place, absorb water and reduce erosion. Above ground, the prairie may look delicate. Underneath, it is built to hold on. There is even a photograph of Murphy Ryan there in 1985, 22 years old, sitting beside Goetz after much of the work had been completed. When storms and erosion eventually rendered the old stairs unusable and she came home to find access closed, she had a hard time accepting that the story would end there.
What followed were approximately six years of bids, designs, fundraising, permitting, construction delays and changing costs. Work elsewhere on the lakefront brought the project to a halt for a time. Board leadership changed. Plans changed. Contractors changed. At several points, Murphy Ryan says, funding threatened to stop the project altogether. She kept going. “There’s no way I could leave it without finishing that,” she says. “No way.”
Murphy Ryan credits a long list of people and organizations with helping move the project forward, including LBOLA and some key board members, the Ragsdale family, the Lake Bluff Park District, Village staff, contractors, donors and residents who supported fundraising efforts. LBOLA’s Summer Solstice Soiree at the beach was part of the effort to raise money for conservation and restoration work. A ribbon-cutting event to recognize those who contributed time, support and funding is in planning.
A conventional metal park bench would have been easier and considerably less complicated. She resisted it. The original benches had been designed by Steve Christy to sit within the prairie rather than on top of it, and Ryan wanted to preserve that feeling. The new benches use reclaimed white oak sourced from the region, and the wood was treated with a Japanese charring technique suggested and installed by Ragsdale, Inc. intended to help it withstand the punishing conditions of the lakefront.
The railing, too, became part of the evolving design. Murphy Ryan initially worried it would interrupt the simplicity of the original structure. In the end, she came to appreciate something she hadn’t fully considered: for older residents and others who need additional stability, the handrail could mean the difference between looking down at the prairie and entering it. That distinction matters to her. The point of the stairs, Murphy Ryan says, isn’t simply getting from one elevation to another. It’s what happens when you arrive. “You’re down in it,” she says. “Instead of looking at it.”
Sit on one of the benches and the village above largely disappears. There is prairie around you, beach below and Lake Michigan ahead. Monarchs and other pollinators move through the native plantings. For a moment, Murphy Ryan says, the experience of being there can change something in you. “If you sit there for a moment,” she says, “you can’t put a dollar sign on it. One hears the music of the wind, one feels it, and becomes one with the prairie."
Perhaps there is something fitting about the plants Murphy Ryan has spent so much of her life protecting. Prairie plants endure in part because of what happens beneath the surface: roots reaching down and outward, holding soil in place and helping the landscape withstand what comes at it. Communities aren’t so different.
For six years, through rising costs, stalled plans and changing circumstances, Murphy Ryan kept holding onto this small piece of Lake Bluff. Not because a set of stairs was particularly important on its own, but because of what those stairs allow people to reach. More than 40 years after she first helped plant the beach prairie, Murphy Ryan can once again take the way back down. And so can everyone else.
Pioneer Press, 1984
LBOLA Board Members, 2026 Stay tuned for upcoming information on key contributors in a developing LBOLA newsletter at lbola.org.