WBEZ | Transportation

1 in 12 Illinois bridges 'structurally deficient'

Wed, 19 Jun 2013 08:50:00 -0500

A transportation advocacy group says about 1 in 12 Illinois bridges are "structurally deficient" and need serious maintenance and rehabilitation or should be replaced entirely.

Illinois fared far better than many other states, ranking 35th in the survey by the Transportation for America. The organization's report says the state had more than 2,300 structurally deficient bridges in 2013.

Illinois has more than 26,500 bridges.

The state's 8.7 percent average was slightly better than the national figure, which the group pegged at about 11 percent.

Transportation for America used federal highway data to produce the rankings.

In search of Chicago’s abandoned cable car tunnels

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:30:00 -0500

I’ve been spending a lot of time underground the past few weeks.

Like, literally. I’ve been trying to answer a question Rogers Park resident Karri DeSelm submitted to Curious City:

I have heard there is a network of layered tunnels under the city. Is this true, and if so, what was the purpose of the tunnels when they were designed and built?

Next week I’ll have a full answer for Karri, exploring what turns out to be the many different kinds of tunnels hidden under Chicago’s downtown.

In the meantime, here’s a kind of preview: a look at one particular set of historic tunnels – and a search for what’s left of them.

The past

You may not know it, but before Chicago had the “L” the city ran on cable cars. In fact, Chicago was once home to the world’s largest and most profitable network of cable cars.

And, just as city planners built bridges to take traffic of all kinds over the Chicago River, they also built tunnels under the river, first for pedestrians and wagon traffic and later for street cars.

In the mid-1800s, before Chicago built its famous bascule draw bridges, “bridges used to be on a central pivot, so they were often open,” says Northwestern University’s Carl Smith, who has written extensively about Chicago’s infrastructural history. “People on horse-drawn carriages would have to wait to cross.”

So the city dug two tunnels to alleviate traffic, one under the river at Washington Street that opened in 1869, and another at LaSalle Street that opened on July 4, 1871. An illustration of the LaSalle Street tunnel from an 1877 guidebook depicts a series of three brick-lined archways: two one-way passages for wagon traffic and a third for pedestrian use. According to Carl Smith, one reporter noted the following about the LaSalle Street tunnel on the day of its grand opening:

It was “well lighted with gas, and admirably ventilated, and as neat, clean, and free from dampness as could be desired. In all respects it seemed to be a model tunnel,” especially when compared to the damp and “unpleasant” Washington Street Tunnel. . .

One speaker noted that the choice of Independence Day for the opening was especially fitting, “since the completion of the tunnel was the beginning of an era of independence from bridge-tenders, railway companies, and lazy lake captains.”

The opening date of the LaSalle Street tunnel was also a lucky break for thousands of Chicago residents who used it to flee from the Great Chicago Fire only a few months later.

When cable cars and then street cars came to Chicago in 1882, the tunnels had to be dug deeper underground. “They were very shallow,” says CTA transit historian Bruce Moffat. “As ships got bigger they started worried about hulls of ships running into them.”

The refurbished tunnels were approximately 60 feet underground, as deep as the deepest portions of today’s CTA tunnels. But their entryways were much steeper: they rose and fell at a 12 percent grade, according to Moffat.

“The steepest grade or ramp an ‘L’ train has now is in the order of four percent,” Moffat said. “So they had to be going actually at a pretty good clip at the bottom.”

The West Chicago Street Railroad, a private cable car company, dug a third tunnel under the Chicago River between Van Buren and Jackson Streets in 1894. But as the city moved on from cable cars to electric streetcars, and from electric street cars to elevated trains (and diesel busses and cars), the older means of transit faded away and the companies that ran them gradually went out of business.

All three cable and streetcar tunnels were eventually shut down and sealed off, and Moffat says they are not incorporated into existing CTA infrastructure.

“They’ve long since been decked over at both ends,” he said.

The present

There’s a ramp on LaSalle Street just south of Kinzie, which many people think is a remnant of the old cable car tunnel. It’s not – that ramp leads down to a loading dock on Carroll Street, which is adjacent to the river and the buildings on either side of LaSalle.

But during my conversation with Bruce Moffat, he left me with this one tantalizing tidbit: “If you go to the corner of LaSalle and Kinzie,” he said, “you’ll find a manhole cover that leads down into the tunnels.”

Really? That sounded like a dare to me.

I called up my go-to guys for checking out historic urban remnants: Dan Pogorzelski, Jacob Kaplan and Patrick Steffes. They run the website Forgotten Chicago, which chronicles strange and delightful bits of the city’s built ephemera. They also offer walking and biking tours, such as their upcoming bike tour of Chicago’s Avondale neighborhood.

I convinced Dan, Jacob and Patrick to help me look for signs of the old tunnels —and, if possible, to help me find a way inside.

We met up at the corner of LaSalle and Kinzie on a Saturday morning, in search of Moffat’s manhole cover. But a cursory look reveals that this particular intersection is lousy with manhole covers, most stamped with the names of various utility companies.

We skulk around for a while counting. Finally Patrick returns with a tally, an astonishing 57 manhole covers.

“Counting side streets but not counting square covers or storm sewers,” Patrick says.

Dan asks whether this might merit an honorary street sign.

After more scouting (and a little jaywalking) we amble over to the landscaped median running through LaSalle Street. There, just north of Kinzie we spotted an unusually large and unmarked manhole. It was almost a manhole cover within a manhole cover – and it was locked.

“This would be at the point where the tunnel would be coming in,” Dan said, peering down, and reminding us that the tunnel’s termination point was actually closer to Hubbard Street.

He wriggled onto his belly and lay down in the street to see if he could peer inside, as cars honked and changed lanes to avoid him. But the hole was too small for him to make out anything below the surface.

We found a matching manhole cover on the other side of the river, just north of Lake Street and again, just east of the median on LaSalle. We were foiled here, too, as this one was not just locked but cemented shut.

We had better luck finding tunnel remnants on Washington Street. On the west side of the river, Washington passes under the Ogilvie Transportation Center. There’s an eastbound lane of traffic, a westbound lane, and curiously, a center lane, too.

Jacob, who wrote the introduction to Greg Borzo’s book on the history of Chicago’s cable cars, pointed out a metal seam running through the street. Whereas the outside lanes of traffic were paved with asphalt, this center lane was covered in a concrete pad.

“This is definitely a remnant,” Jacob said. “I’m almost 100 percent sure this is the cable car tunnel under here. This is actually a concrete pad. This supposedly covers up the portal.”

Unfortunately, this pad-covered portal was not going to take us anywhere deeper than street level. There would be no tunnel access for us, at least not on this trip. But the Forgotten Chicago crew did help me catch sight of interesting, overlooked elements in the built environment I would have otherwise missed. In other words, they did what they do best.

If you want more historic cable car remnants still and can’t wait until next week, check out Greg Borzo describe what else is left of that old school transit system in the audio above.

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Greg Borzo spoke at an event presented by Chicago Public Library in January of 2013. Click here to hear the event in its entirety.

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Mods vs. Rockers Rally continues rivalry between bike cultures

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:12:00 -0500

In the summer of 1964, the English seaside resort town of Brighton was the battleground for two rival motorcycle gangs: the Mods and the Rockers. Almost five decades later, Rockers Larry Fletcher and Martin Cimek continues the infamous ‘Battle of Brighton’ by hosting the 9th annual Mods vs. Rockers Vintage Motorcycle and Scooter Rally in Chicago.

The relationship between the two factions has changed since they met on the south shore of England.

On Thursday, the Rockers parked their Triumph and Ducati motorbikes next to the Mod’s Vespa and Lambretta scooters outside the Isle of Man clothing shop and gallery on North Lincoln Avenue. They gathered for an art show featuring work by German photographer Horst Fredricks on the two subcultures.

“This year we kind of hit the homerun by bringing the music and culture to the motorcycle show, and it is something we’ve been trying to do for years,” Cimek said.

Fletcher and Cimek make up the Steel Toe Press, an event company dedicated to keeping the vintage motorbikes community in high gear. They have organized motorcycle shows since 2005, but this is the first year where they will expand the Mods vs. Rockers Rally to include the culture surrounding these machines. This weekend’s event will include hot rod exhibitions, motorcycle stunt shows, a vintage fashion contest and a Rockabilly concert featuring performers such as Reverend Horton Heat and Lee Rocker.

“A lot of these bikes that are invited to these events are simply machines you don’t get to see anymore, and I think everybody is fascinated by that aspect of it,” Cimek said. “They are beautiful and influenced by a lot of different things that happened throughout different eras that we’ve seen throughout pop culture.”

Fletcher and Cimek have both loved bikes since they were kids, revelling in the daredevilry of Evel Knievel and aspiring to be Steve McQueen escaping Nazi soldiers on his Triumph TR6 Trophy motorcycle in The Great Escape. A trip to England in the mid-’90s inspired Fletcher to start the Ace Cafe in Chicago, copying a North London motorcycle cafe of the same name.

“In 1994, I went to a Rocker’s reunion in London. It was at the Chelsea Bridge,” Fletcher said. “That was how I was first exposed to real Rocker culture ‘cause they still have a strong Rocker culture in the U.K. When I was there, I thought this was really cool and I would like to recreate this in the U.S.”

The cafe closed 18 months later, but Fletcher continues to organize motorcycle events which has attracted as many as 4,000 attendees. Cimek expects this weekend’s event to top 5,000 motorcycle enthusiasts.

Fletcher estimates that the number of Rockers outnumber Mods four to one at previous events, but this weekend’s rally might challenge their status quo.

“We have Mods coming from Canada, from Ireland,” Fletcher said. “We have a big contingent of Mods coming from Texas. So we’ve already been warned that the rumble might be on.”

Cimek says the Rockers and the Mods do not ride together, but they have learned to tolerate each other in recent years.

“We still don’t understand how they can feel macho and ride with their knees together,” Fletcher said.

The Mods vs. Rockers Vintage Motorcycle and Scooter Rally will be held at the Aragon Entertainment Center on 1106 W. Lawrence Ave on June 15.

For more information, visit modsvsrockerschicago.com.

Lee Jian Chung is a WBEZ arts and culture intern. Follow him @jclee89.

Chicago opens new barrier-protected bike lanes

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 10:37:00 -0500

New barrier-protected bike lanes have opened along Chicago's Milwaukee Avenue, the city's most heavily biked corridor.

Thousands of cyclists zip along the roadway each day on commutes into the business district from the northwest.

The section with protective barriers separating the bike lanes from vehicle traffic is along a nearly one-mile stretch just outside downtown.

The Chicago Department of Transportation announced opening of the bike corridor on Thursday. It estimates that bicycles account for more than 40 percent of the traffic along the corridor during rush hour.

Bicycle traffic signals and the city's first bike passing lanes for faster cyclists is part of the roadway.

The city says 20,000 bicyclists commute daily to downtown.

Chicago has 170 miles of bike lanes and aims to reach 645 miles by 2020.

Chicago bike share launch delayed

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 06:42:00 -0500

The launch of Chicago’s new bike share program is being delayed by two weeks.

Divvy was supposed to open for business Friday, capping off Bike to Work Week. But a statement posted on the program’s Tumblr site on Tuesday afternoon said the launch was being pushed back “to ensure we have the necessary time to test stations and ensure the system is fully functioning.”

Beyond the testing, Scott Kubly, Managing Deputy Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation, said his agency wasn’t done building the 75 bike docking stations originally scheduled to come online with the launch.

A fastener used to connect bike holsters to the rest of the docking station arrived from a supplier only a few days ago.

Kubly called the components “minor but important,” and said that working without the parts in hand would have meant the majority of bike stations wouldn’t be finished in time.

“It would have been well below our goal of 50 [stations],” Kubly said. “It would have been in the teens at best.”

CDOT contracted with Portland, Oregon-based Public Bike Share Company to build Divvy’s infrastructure. PBSC works with a variety of subcontractors to manufacture its parts.

Kubly said his team will use the extra time to finish building the docking stations, and to test out each of the 950 bikes they hope to have available for the launch. Ultimately Divvy plans to have 300 stations with 3,000 bikes by the end of the summer, and an additional 100 stations and 1,000 bikes by next spring. Divvy is being launched in part with $22 million in federal funding.

Officials in Chicago have been closely monitoring the launch of another bike share program, New York’s Citi Bike, since it launched two weeks ago. According to the program’s blog, more than 36,000 people have signed up for annual memberships so far, and over 173,000 trips have been made. But the program has been beset by technical glitches, and some have complained that New York launched its bike share too hastily.

Both Chicago and New York are partnering with Montreal-based Alta to run their bike share programs.

So far 1,200 Chicagoans have signed up for Divvy annual memberships, which run $75 to $125. Users can purchase a daily pass for $7. Because the program was designed to help users make very short trips, and to address what some planners call the “last two miles” problem of commuting, trips are limited to 30 minutes. After that a usage fee kicks in.

Despite the delayed launch, CDOT officials are going ahead with a rally at Daley Plaza Friday to open Divvy’s first station.

“I signed up for a membership,” Kubly said. “And it’s not just because I’m managing the program.”

Robin Amer is a producer on WBEZ’s digital team. Follow her on Twitter @rsamer.

Chicago's municipal device: The city's symbol lurking in plain sight

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 12:54:00 -0500

Though many Chicagoans have forgotten it, the city’s municipal device may be on its way back to prominence.

A few years ago my colleague Elliott Ramos took an extensive look at Chicago’s love affair with its flag. And while the Chicago flag is a wonderful example of meaningful design and a potent sign of civic pride, the municipal device is both older and more versatile. And ready to make a comeback.

What is the municipal device, you ask? Chicago municipal code defines it thusly:

“The municipal device, for use by the varied unofficial interests of the city and its people, shall show a Y-shaped figure in a circle, colored and designed to suit individual tastes and needs.” It symbolizes the Chicago River’s three branches, created in 1892 for a Chicago Tribune contest. In 1917 the City Council made the flag, seal and municipal device official city symbols.

The marquee of the Chicago Theater is probably the most famous example of the municipal device, but there are hundreds of examples hidden in plain sight around the city. Chicago public libraries, traffic control boxes and lamp posts are common places to find them (check out this Flickr group for more examples).

Though there are new instances of the municipal device, it’s become less and less popular throughout the later half of the twentieth century. In 1999 Chicago’s cultural historian Tim Samuelson told the Chicago Tribune,

"I heard that the city hesitated to use it later because in the 1960s it looked like the peace symbol with the Y upside down." (In some uses, the Y is upside down to celebrate the reversing of the Chicago River.)

David Reynolds, Commissioner of Fleet and Facility Management, thinks city vehicles stopped bearing the municipal device, opting instead for the city seal, when vinyl stickers made details easy to replicate. He’s not sure when exactly that happened.

Nevermind that municipal code states:

“All automobiles and other vehicles which are owned by the city, except those used by the commissioner of police, and the detective bureau of the department of police, shall be distinctly marked as the property of the city by painting or placing thereon in a conspicuous place, in such a manner that the same cannot be removed, the municipal device, together with the words “City of Chicago”, and the name of the department operating the said automobile or other vehicle.”

I guess the seal is considered close enough to the device to count, but I’d love to see Streets and Sanitation trucks with the Chicago Y on them.

For that matter I’d also love to see posters, T-shirts, tattoos and more bearing the municipal device.

One local company is banking on the municipal device’s enduring design appeal. Ale Syndicate is a new Chicago-themed brewery that uses the symbol as their secondary logo. Marketing manager Abby Kempf said the municipal device helped establish their Chicago bona-fides.

“We wanted something that someone who really loves the city would be really excited about,” Kempf said.

She added, “You kind of forget about how important the river was to the success of the city.”

Here’s a promotional video featuring the fim they collaborated with, Design Scout:

Do you like the municipal device? Do you think it’s due for a comeback?

Clark Street: Photo of the Day - June 11, 2013

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 09:55:00 -0500

How does mass transit figure into Chicago's sidewalk cafes?

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 19:13:00 -0500

In our recent story on Chicago's sidewalk cafes, we sought to figure out how and why there were focused on the North Side.

We delved into economic development projects, but also wanted to key in mass transit, which appears to play a big part.

The map below shows the 2012 sidewalk cafe permits alongside the CTA transit routes.

Chicago aldermen approve free Sunday parking, longer meter hours

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 13:09:00 -0500

Chicago drivers will soon be spared from having to feed parking meters on Sundays, but they’ll make up for it with longer meter hours during the rest of the week, under changes to the city’s unpopular parking privatization contract that the City Council approved on Wednesday.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s tweaks to the much-hated privatization plan passed the full Council by a vote of 39 to 11, even as a cadre of aldermen remained concerned the changes could hurt local businesses, and possibly lead to profit windfall for Chicago Parking Meters LLC, the private firm that runs the meters.

But a comfortable majority of aldermen nonetheless backed the mayor’s proposal, and praised him for negotiating a deal that the Emanuel administration claims will save the city about $25 million a year in penalties it would have had to pay to the meter company.

“I have true respect for opening up the wound and cauterizing it the best you possibly can,” said 33rd Ward Ald. Dick Mell, a staunch Emanuel ally.

Wednesday’s final vote is the culmination of months of fighting between City Hall and Chicago Parking Meters LLC.

The company had billed the city about $49 million for meters that were taken out of service during the last two years for things like street festivals and construction. But as part of the agreement, the city will pay only $8.9 million for those years, and will end up paying about $1 billion less in penalties over the remaining 71 years of the parking meter lease, according to the mayor’s office.

The second part of the deal is what’s become known as the “Sunday swap”: In exchange for free Sunday parking in most Chicago neighborhoods, drivers will have to start feeding the meters longer beginning sometime this summer. Hours for non-residential meters outside the central business district will extend from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., while meters around the River North nightlife district will now operate until midnight.

The mayor has said repeatedly that, with his changes, he’s “trying to make a little lemonade out of a big lemon.”

But speaking before Wednesday’s vote. Ald. Bob Fioretti turned that talking point on its head.

“Some lemons shouldn’t be made into lemonade,” Fioretti said. “Some lemons should be returned to the store for a refund.”

It was the Sunday swap - which some aldermen say was shoe-horned into the deal by Emanuel to score political points with voters - that plagued some aldermen.

Fioretti was one of a handful of aldermen who led the charge against Emanuel’s proposal during four days of painstakingly detailed City Council hearings. But an effort to separate the two parts of the deal failed in committee on Monday, after the Emanuel’s administration warned that tinkering with any part of the negotiated settlement would sink the deal entirely.

Aldermen also questioned the administration’s math that CPM stands to lose about $8.4 million in revenue each year as a result of the free Sundays, while it will make only about $7.4 million from the extended hours. Emanuel’s staff hired an outside firm to corroborate those estimates - a study that could cost the city about $250,000.

But the possibility of giving any more revenue to the meter company was too much for some aldermen, who still feel burned by the original 2008 meter privatization that led to dramatically higher parking rates across the city, after former Mayor Richard Daley crammed the deal through the City Council in just three days.

The city got $1.15 billion in the deal, but drivers got saddled with some of the highest parking rates in the country.

Free Sunday parking will kick in mid-summer, at the earliest. But some aldermen are already talking about reinstating paid Sundays, as some small businesses say parking pay boxes help keep customers moving through high-traffic retail areas.

“Meters are for economic development, okay? They were never thought of as a revenue source,” said Ald. Tom Tunney, who said he plans to fight for paid Sunday parking in some areas of his North Side ward. “Sunday is the first- or second-busiest day in our neighborhoods. Give free meters on Tuesday.”

Language allowing aldermen to scale back free Sunday parking was not part of the ordinance that passed Wednesday. But the mayor’s office has said those changes can be made later, on a ward-by-ward basis.

Alex Keefe covers politics for WBEZ. Follow him @akeefe.

How the Dan Ryan changed the South Side

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 19:42:00 -0500

If you’re personally familiar with Chicago’s Dan Ryan Expressway, your appreciation for this story will greatly improve if you stop reading for a moment, visualize your last trip and consider some stats you probably never compiled.

Maybe you never counted the number of lanes (there are 14, counting both local and express traffic), or you missed the fact that — all told — there are 62 ramps on the expressway. And even if you were driving alone, you had a lot of company; each day, more than 250,000 drivers zip along the 9-mile long stretch, which moves south from Roosevelt Road to 95th Street.

Come to think of it, maybe you’d be impressed even if your tires never touched the expressway’s pavement.

Well, the Dan Ryan’s inspired several Curious City questions, the bulk of them from Ryne Holmquist of Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood. Ryne’s grandparents grew up in Woodlawn, and he’d asked them what their lives were like on the South Side. But, he says, he wanted to know more. Curious City editors and producers condensed his questions into this:

What did the Chicago South Side look like before the Dan Ryan Expressway?

It’s a broad question to be sure, so it helped to know that Ryne was particularly interested in why the expressway was constructed in the first place, and a little about whether the area’s racial makeup changed.

And here’s where we — four University of Chicago undergraduates — step in. We addressed Ryne’s questions by reading city archives, poring over historical maps and collecting relevant photographs. We also talked to people who recall the days before the Dan Ryan’s arrival, and we also hoofed it around several South Side neighborhoods.

The skinny is that the South Side changed forever after the Dan Ryan’s arrival, but maybe not entirely because of the Dan Ryan itself.

Why the behemoth in the first place?

The expressway was originally called the South Route. In 1961, it was renamed after Dan Ryan Jr., the former president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and a strong proponent of expressways.

When it opened in 1962 the Dan Ryan promptly became host to shenanigans.

We learned some of these accounts from Andy Plummer, a transportation historian who documents the Cook Expressways on his website.

“The thing I remember about the Dan Ryan was that there was a vendor that came onto the expressway using the ramp," he says. "He figured with all those people there, he was going to be able to sell some hotdogs. ... He was the first one arrested.”

Plummer's got a lot of personal history with expressways, too. He’s worked on studies concerning the Dan Ryan (both before and after construction), and his father was involved in planning many Chicago expressways.

Before the Dan Ryan, Chicago had already built the Congress Expressway (1955) and the Kennedy Expressway (1960).

"The motivation for the South Route was the same as the Northwest and Congress," Plummer says. "And that was to have a freeway system that served all of the city of Chicago and that focused on the downtown."

This was the era of post-World War II renewal, a time when city planners, politicians, and government officials believed a superhighway would protect the downtown area’s economic vitality. It was part of an urban renewal movement meant to revitalize inner cities, all while accounting for Americans’ growing infatuation with the automobile. And with superhighways cropping up in Los Angeles and New York City, Chicago felt the pressure to catch up.

How’d they manage the alternatives?

Planning for the Dan Ryan stems back to the 1920s. Then, Plummer says,

“The city was still enamored with the idea of using Lake Shore Drive as their superhighway system.

“But because of several issues, [Lake Shore Drive] could not be brought up to the correct and high enough standards. So gradually, the alignment moved west. The next alignment, the most prevalent through the 30s and 40s was basically along State Street. Then it migrated west.”

Dispelling an urban legend

But what about Ryne’s interest in the racial makeup of the area? (“Were there black neighborhoods, white neighborhoods?”)

We should note that the Dan Ryan’s final route took more than a decade to sort out, but when all was said and done, the expressway did mark a division between the predominantly white neighborhood of Bridgeport and the expanding “Black Belt” neighborhoods to the east. Chicago’s long-standing racial segregation is infamous, but did the Dan Ryan create racial boundaries or reinforce them?

Available maps and data can shed light on this. In 1940 the highest concentration of blacks stretched along the “Black Belt,” which spanned south from 31st to 60th, and went east from the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad tracks to Cottage Grove Avenue. By 1970, the boundary between blacks and whites had shifted several blocks west, along the Pennsylvania Railroad and encompassing the area now occupied by the Dan Ryan.

But Dennis McClendon’s map, which incorporates data drawn from the 1950 census, suggests that blacks were moving west before the expressway was finished. Note the light purple areas that show blacks’ presence just north of Garfield Avenue. This means if the Dan Ryan was a barrier, it wasn’t a very effective one — at least south of Bridgeport.

Dominic Pacyga in Chicago: A Biography argues that other barriers — such as political power, street gangs, railroad viaducts, and railyards — posed greater obstacles to blacks' expansion into white neighborhoods.

And Paul Bruce, a tour guide for the South Side, adds that the Dan Ryan may have “reinforced the separation between blacks and white” but it only “continued the pattern that was there ... it didn’t create the pattern. ... The Dan Ryan reinforced boundaries but made it possible to get out to the Southwest Side of Chicago, where the cornfields had been. ... It made it possible to get to the suburbs and still get back into the city quickly.”

In other words, Bruce says, the expressway "helped expedite the exodus of the white community from the Southwest Side."

Did the Dan Ryan arrive without a fight?

With so much change in order, it’s a fair question to ask where the neighborhood itself landed on the issue of the looming construction.

“People didn’t really know what expressways were on the South Side," says Paul Bruce. "With the Dan Ryan, the properties that they bought were very working-class neighborhoods. No one was going to fight for a little 5-room cottage tucked away by the railroads that still had steam locomotives running through, spilling steam and cinders on you. Those people were sometimes very happy to sell out and go because they weren’t living in the ideal neighborhood anyway.”

But the South Side was not (nor is it now) a homogenous place. “Now a little farther south in the 70s and 80s where the Dan Ryan cut through the bungalow belt built in the 1920s, there was some opposition,” Bruce says. “Because, ‘You know, my father built this beautiful two-flat and we’ve taken care of it and we don’t want to go.’ ”

Compare this to what happened during the 1970s, when Chicago was pushing for the Crosstown Expressway (never built). There was more opposition this time, Bruce says, because people didn’t want to give up their homes.

Plummer sums up the positive atmosphere regarding superhighway building before the Crosstown Expressway proposal.

“There was a different feeling then and that was [what] people wanted ... a good way to get from point A to point B in their car.”

The Dan Ryan, for good or ill

Archival photos in the Encyclopedia of Chicago and the Chicago History Museum show properties were eaten up to make space for the Dan Ryan. Bruce tells us that some buildings were actually relocated.

“If they bought your bungalow or your two-flat building, if you wanted to you could buy it back for a dollar and have it put on rollers and have it rolled somewhere else,” he says. “So you could go to State Street at midnight sometimes and see a two-flat building going down the street to a new location. Somebody had bought a lot and put it on rollers and just rolled it away.”

But this didn’t happen often, as many of these properties were run-down residential buildings and churches.

Chris Goes of Goes Lithography Co. had a plant at 61st Street beside the Dan Ryan. He observes that the structures displaced were “very old buildings by the time that the racial makeup began to change, with poor sanitation and construction. Mostly black [migrants] came and settled in these poor areas.”

But what effect did such displacement have on the South Side's peripheral neighborhoods, the ones not directly along the Dan Ryan’s path? Our sources suggest that the South Side’s economic decline cannot be attributed directly to the expressway.

“There were plenty of other factors mixed in there," says Plummer. "With basically the closing down of the [Union] Stock Yards and the shutting down of Pullman, those kinds of things ... had more effect on [periphery neighborhoods] than the expressway.”

Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps (compiled by student Sam Brandt) suggest Plummer's got a point. Neighborhoods across the South Side had been home to a diverse mix of industrial giants, including the stockyards. These giants, though, weren't slain by a behemoth expressway alone. In cases like this, it’s not what’s cutting through the neighborhoods, but the businesses around them that determine their character.

Our final thoughts

Following World War II, the Dan Ryan continued a development trend that major cities were in love with: creating miles and miles of superhighway systems to hustle more people downtown.

Though an important piece to Chicago’s urban renewal plans, the Dan Ryan did not play a critical role in altering the South Side’s post-war landscape. For example, the fact that it was built adjacent to the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad shows that planners considered existing neighborhood layouts.

Ultimately, the Dan Ryan did integrate itself into the daily bustle of South Side residents, but it wasn’t always an easy fit.

Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayer

We talked to Jay Wolke, whose photography collection, Along the Divide, showcased life and death along this expressway during the 1980s. Perhaps he sums it up best. He says he never looked at the expressway as just an object. It met a cultural need, he says, and that means it’s a human subject.

“This is a piece of engineering that separates and yet combines communities,” Wolke says. “It has a kind of dynamic where you can either be a part of it or you can be separated from it. It is a very dynamic system that we call this Dan Ryan Expressway."