THE GREAT ‘SCAPE

The end of the road for Lake Forest’s Deerpath Streetscape Project is nigh, assures Bernard Pondexter

Bernard Pondexter wants business owners along Deerpath Road in Lake Forest to grow tired of seeing him. “I like to over-communicate,” admits the City of Lake Forest’s affable Engineering Section Lead Project  Manager,  who  oversaw Phase 1—water main replacement—of the Deerpath Streetscape Project (DSP) and will oversee the Bank Lane Enhancements beginning this month. “If they’re sick of me, that means I’m showing them I care and that I’m doing my job. At least two times a week, I ask each owner, ‘How are you doing?’ I don’t like surprises; business owners don’t like surprises.” DSP aims to improve pedestrian safety, renew infrastructure, and beautify Lake Forest’s main thoroughfare with new trees, decorative elements, and hanging planter baskets. “Once completed, it will blow Lake Forest residents away,” Pondexter, predicts, adding the DSP is on track to cross the finish line by late October, ahead of the annual Tree Lighting Holiday Celebration. “I look at the water main replacement as the appetizer for the streetscape phase of the project,” Pondexter says, recalling how he always ate dinner with late parents, Albert and Bernice, and his five brothers and six sisters while growing up on Chicago’s South Side. “My parents taught me structure and stressed the importance of working hard and being nice to people,” says the Corliss High School graduate. “My brother Charles served as my mentor in engineering.” Bernard, a City of Lake Forest employee since 2006 and a resident of Gurnee, had an inestimable hand in a pair of recent undertakings—the Forest Park bluff stabilization and beach pathway projects—that won American Public Works Association awards. “When I do anything professionally, I strive for perfection,” says Pondexter, who shares daughter Nicole with his wife of 28 years, Harriet. “All throughout this Deerpath Streetscape Project, which began in January, doing all that’s necessary to meet the high expectations of those who live in Lake Forest drives me. They’ll be relieved when it’s over. Full of joy, too. Nothing would please me more than hearing, ‘You knocked it out of the park’.’”

For updates on the Deerpath Streetscape Project, visit cityoflakeforest.com/deerpathstreetscape.