WBEZ | infrastructure

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."

Water, water everywhere, but not enough to drink

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:43:00 -0500

The story of Chicago’s founding as a modern American city sometimes reads like the creation myth of some bygone animist religion. We were meant to settle here, the story goes, because this is the spot where the winding Chicago River empties cleanly into the great blue expanse of Lake Michigan. This is the place where the prairie meets the water, where the water meets the prairie.

Great news – especially the water part – for a booming metropolis, right?

“It would seem that Chicago would have no problem,” said Northwestern University historian Carl Smith. “Twenty percent of the world’s surface water is right there. . . What more could you want?”

Actually, Smith says, Chicago’s natural landscape proved a huge disadvantage to early settlers.

The ground was soggy and drained poorly. The river deposited silt in the lake and made navigation around the mouth of the river nearly impossible. And crucially, the city made the grave mistake of dumping its waste and pulling its drinking water from the same source.

Can you say cholera? It took an outbreak of the waterborne disease (and the surfacing of dead bodies in the shore-side cemetery) for city fathers to figure out what a bad idea this was.

Smith has studied of what came next, and the resulting book, City Water, City Life (University of Chicago Press, 2013), outlines the Chicago’s early attempts to build the kind of water infrastructure needed to support the Windy City’s rapid growth.

The bigger Chicago got, the more desperate its water problems became. The city had 330,000 inhabitants by 1870, and over a million just 20 years later, making it the second largest in the country and ushering in a kind of urban density the country had never known.

You can’t just let people fend for themselves at that point, Smith argues – especially if you need them.

“As a matter of principle you cannot deprive people of water, and [in] practice you need these people, particularly to work the jobs in the city,” he said.

In the audio above, Smith explores Chicago’s first few attempts to lick this problem. It’s a shockingly juicy tale for a bit of urban planning history.

My favorite part? The one where fish came right out of the taps!

Dynamic Range showcases hidden gems unearthed from Chicago Amplified’s vast archive of public events and appears on weekends. Carl Smith spoke at an event presented by the Newberry in May 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.

City Water, City Life: Water and the Infrastructure of Ideas in Urbanizing Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:50:00 -0500

A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas, an embodiment of the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created it. In City Water, City Life, historian Carl Smith explores this infrastructure of ideas through an examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s.

Through an analysis of a broad range of sources, Dr. Smith shows how the discussion, design, and use of waterworks reveal how Americans framed their conceptions of urban democracy and how they understood the natural and the built environment, individual health and the well-being of society, and the qualities of time and history.

City Water, City Life is more than a history of urbanization. It is also a meditation on water as a necessity, as a resource for commerce and industry, and as an essential—and central—part of how we define our civilization.

Carl Smith is the Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English and American Studies and professor of history at Northwestern University. His books include three prize-winning volumes: Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920; Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman; and The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City.

Recorded live Wednesday, May 15, 2013 at The Newberry Library.

That giant gaping hole on the Southside of Chicago? It may not be a sinkhole after all

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:57:00 -0500

A 40-foot hole opened up on a residential street on Chicago’s South Side. It swallowed up three cars and a man who suffered non-life-threatening injuries. Many are calling it a sinkhole. But that might not be quite right.

Anthony Randazzo is professor emeritus at the University of Florida’s geological science department and president of Geohazards, Inc, a business that consults on sinkhole issues all around the world.

He says that the 40-foot hole is actually a giant pothole.

“Unfortunately, journalists don’t like to be told what they have is a pothole and not a sinkhole because that’s far less glamorous,” he said.

Randazzo said sometimes companies that fix these kinds of problems also misuse the term. “Sinkhole” sounds far more terrifying than “pothole” and so they can charge more to fix the issue.

Here’s the real difference according to Randazzo:

Water chemically dissolves limestone, and other similar stones, over many years, forming underground caverns. If one of those caverns collapses, then you got yourself a sinkhole.

In Chicago, a water main broke, perhaps due to the extreme downpour. That physically-- not chemically which is key-- eroded the soil. The result was a pothole.

In Illinois, we don’t have much limestone, so true sinkholes are unlikely. They are more common in places like Florida, where limestone is present.

But don’t be deceived, said Randazzo, potholes can be a real problem for big cities.

“There is a rapid deterioration of infrastructure in major cities,” said Randazzo. “You can expect to see more of this.”

If potholes don’t sound quite terrifying enough to describe the pictures and videos you’ve seen today, feel free to tweet me your alternative titles at @shannon_h or leave them in the comments.

Illinois' not-so-magnificent miles

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 05:00:00 -0500

'SIMPLY UNACCEPTABLE.' That's the American Society of Civil Engineers president assessing the D-plus his group's awarding Illinois for condition of its infrastructure. The Tribune says the society found 73 percent of Illinois roads in poor or mediocre shape -- at an average annual cost to the typical motorist of $292 in extra vehicle repairs and operating costs.
* So come for a visit -- but just don't drive: Chicago's set to double its tourism and convention bureau budget this year.

'MAYOR STEPHENS WANTS THE CUBS TO KNOW THEY HAVE AN OPTION.' A spokesman for Rosemont elaborates on an offer to give the Ricketts family 25 acres of land to build a replica of Wrigley Field in the 'burbs if things don't work out in Chicago.
* Plan to spend $3 million to expand the Northerly Island concert pavilion up for vote Thursday.

'APOLOGIZE ON AIR FOR SYMPATHIZING WITH THE STEUBENVILLE RAPISTS.' More than 100,000 people have signed an online petition demanding CNN renounce its "disgusting" portrayal of two athletes convicted of raping a woman.
* TV networks aired 16-year-old rape victim's name.
* Blogger who flagged Steubenville case fights criticism she helped create "Internet lynch mob."

Get this blog by email, free. Sign up here.

THE STATE OF JOURNALISM. Know the story of the blind men and the elephant? That's the sort of treatment the Pew Research Center’s 2012 News Media Consumption survey is getting. Choose your own adventure:
* "Report: Local news somehow even worse than it was before."
* "News Coverage of Local Politics Is Fading Away."
* "State of the media: The cracks are still widening, but some light is also getting in."
* "As Mobile Grows Rapidly, the Pressures on News Intensify."
* "Nearly one-third of U.S. adults have abandoned a news outlet due to dissatisfaction."
* "This Is the Scariest Statistic About the Newspaper Business Today."
* "Newspaper Newsroom Staff Numbers Are at Lowest Point Since 1978."

... AND SO, CRY 'HYPOCRISY' IF YOU WILL. BUT NOT IF YOU CLICK HERE. The Atlantic: "17,616 Men Went to the ER for Zipper-Related Penis Injuries Between 2002 and 2010."

ANNOUNCEMENTS.
* Suggestions for this blog? Email anytime.
* Follow us on Twitter: @WBEZ and @Meyerson.
* Looking for the most recent WBEZ Meyerson News Quiz? Here you go.

Navistar layoffs add to doubts about incentives

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 16:22:00 -0600

Sears Holdings Corp. and Chicago’s financial exchanges have quit threatening to pull up stakes now that Illinois has enacted tax breaks for them. But it remains unclear whether state incentives to big companies are wise uses of economic-development resources. A personnel shift by Lisle-based Navistar International Corp. will add fresh doubt.

WBEZ has learned that some new jobs Navistar promised under an Illinois incentive agreement are coming to the state at the expense of unionized workers in Indiana.

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn announced the Navistar incentives last year after the company threatened to pack up its headquarters in west suburban Warrenville and leave the state. The deal committed Illinois to a $64.7 million bundle of tax credits and job-training subsidies for the company. It committed Navistar to moving the headquarters to Lisle, a couple miles east, and to adding 400 full-time Illinois employees.

Navistar’s first report to the state about the jobs isn’t due until next year, so it’s hard to tell how many positions the company has created thus far. Employees confirm that dozens of new engineers and designers are working at the Lisle facility.

Navistar is creating those jobs as it phases out its Truck Development and Technology Center in Fort Wayne, Indiana, just three hours southeast of Chicago. The latest Fort Wayne cuts came December 2, when the company laid off 130 employees, mostly engineers and designers who are United Auto Workers members. Before the layoff, some of the Fort Wayne workers had to help train their Lisle replacements.

Navistar has “rewritten the job descriptions so the people that used to do the work here — the union folks — don’t qualify anymore on paper,” said Craig Randolph, a design engineer the company laid off after 15 years at the Fort Wayne center. “So they’re eliminating the high-seniority, older employees like myself and replacing them with nonunion college kids — guys fresh out of school. And the taxpayers in Illinois are subsidizing the whole thing.”

Asked for a response, Navistar spokeswoman Karen Denning called it unusual for engineers to have union representation in the first place, a claim disputed by auto industry experts. Denning also sent a statement that said the company’s decision to shift the Fort Wayne jobs to Lisle was “based solely on our desire to compete in the global economy.” The statement added that Navistar has allowed many Fort Wayne employees to relocate to the Chicago area and stay with the company.

The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity sent a statement that doesn’t directly address whether the Navistar incentives have anything to do with the Fort Wayne layoffs. The statement says the state’s assistance to companies like Navistar over the last decade has “created and retained tens of thousands of jobs,” including unionized positions.

There’s not much proof to back up such claims. Scholars who study the effects of corporate incentives point out that companies decide where to operate based on proximity to suppliers, markets, transportation and so on. Another factor is whether workers are bargaining collectively. Just this summer, Navistar announced it was closing a unionized plant in Chatham, Ontario. The company has moved that work to nonunion facilities in Texas and Mexico.

“I don’t think that the [Illinois] incentives are causing Navistar to shift around its workforce,” said Rachel Weber, an associate professor of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “But they do send a message that the public sector and taxpayers are validating these kinds of activities. And, if you asked a lot of taxpayers in the state of Illinois whether they’d want to support these kinds of activities, I don’t think they’d be so happy about it.”

Weber pointed out that the economies of Illinois and Indiana intertwine closely and said it would help both states to quit poaching jobs from each other. Eliminating state incentives for corporations, she added, would free up resources for everything from workforce readiness to small-business incubation.

The union, for its part, didn’t return calls about the Fort Wayne layoffs and isn’t creating a public fuss about them. That raises questions about the role of UAW Secretary-Treasurer Dennis Williams, who serves on Navistar’s board of directors under a decades-old agreement that reserved the seat for the union. Because Williams draws salaries from both the UAW and Navistar, and because he once directed a UAW region that includes Illinois but not Indiana, some of the union’s Fort Wayne members accuse him of hanging them out to dry.

Englewood Flyover to take aim at rail congestion

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:15:00 -0500

A project aimed with halting one of the region’s worst rail logjams broke ground Monday on Chicago’s South Side.

The so-called Englewood Flyover will cost $133 million. Organizers hope it will ease congestion near 63^rd and State Street, an area that sees an average of 14 Amtrak, 78 Metra and 46 freight trains battle for space each day.

The Englewood Flyover will build a bridge to carry the three Metra Rock Island District Line tracks over the four Norfolk-Southern freight tracks. The bridge — to be completed by 2014 — will also allow for expanded Amtrak service around the Midwest.

Several politicians gathered near the flyover site on Monday morning. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said the project will create 1,500 jobs.

“What does it mean when freight traffic and passenger traffic can move through this city more quickly? More jobs. Not just the jobs in building this project but the reputation of Illinois as the crossroads of the nation,” Durbin said.

The funding sources include $126 million from the federal government and more than $6 million from the state’s Illinois Jobs Now program. The Englewood Flyover is also part of the Chicago Region Environmental and Transportation Efficiency Program (CREATE,) an effort that is supposed to modernize local rail operations, reduce harmful emissions and ease highway congestion.

Nearby resident Bob Israel, a union laborer, showed up at the groundbreaking with skepticism.

“It’s just a dog-and-pony show — trust me,” Israel said.

“We’ve been hearing about this CREATE program for 10-15 years. They say they’re going to hire from the community but I’ve been hearing this for years,” Israel said. He likened it to the Dan Ryan Expressway project, which Israel said didn’t do a good job of community hiring.

At the press conference, Israel asked Quinn who would ensure that the Englewood Flyover project would employ community residents.

Quinn didn’t give an answer.

Electricity shortages in Lebanon spark offshore natural gas exploration

Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:46:00 -0500

In Lebanon, most people have learned to cope with unreliable electricity. But a long term solution to Lebanon’s power problem may lie offshore.

Recently, neighboring Israel discovered an enormous natural gas field in the Mediterranean Sea just south of Lebanon. Energy experts say there’s enough gas there to satisfy Israel’s needs for the next hundred years. Lebanon believes there may be significant natural gas reserves off its coast as well. Don Duncan from the World Vision Report looks into what this could mean for the people of Lebanon.

This story originally aired on the World Vision Report. We got it from the Public Radio Exchange.

Jackson pushes Obama to focus on construction

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0500

As President Obama gears up for a Thursday speech before Congress about his jobs agenda, a civil rights leader in his hometown is urging him to focus on proposing massive investment in construction projects.

With official unemployment hovering above 9 percent, the president is expected to propose training for the long-term jobless, tax credits for companies that hire new workers and an extension of payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits.

Rev. Jesse Jackson said those steps won’t be enough. “You put people back to work fixing our infrastructure, our houses and our transportation,” he said. “We work our way out of the hole. We don’t complain our way out. [President Obama] has the key to, in fact, invest in a mammoth way in putting America back to work.”

In a Monday speech to Detroit union activists, the president did bring up infrastructure. But Republicans, who control the U.S. House, are indicating they will try to block new outlays that would add to the budget deficit.

Building A Better Electric Grid

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 12:00:00 -0500

The nation's electrical grid is getting old, not just in its infrastructure, but in the technology used to run it. In this segment, Ira Flatow and guests discuss the grid, its problems, and how new technology can be used to make the grid "smarter." Will consumers sign on?