I saw something today
Just to let you know, I saw the most bizarre thing I have ever witnessed in Chicago today. While I was in the midst of biking around the Near West Side in order to make my in depth bike map of the community area for extra credit in my urban planning course, I biked across Ashland on 15th after noting the street around Addams Park and stumbled upon a wasteland. It was apparent that there used to be buildings were there was absolutely nothing but grass, dandelions, trees, ans rusted remnants of chain link fences. Blocks and blocks of this neighborhood had been completely demolished. The streets were completely bikable and drivable and even the alleys halfway between the blocks were left. Some of the sidewalks were completely overgrown, but the next block over appeared to be a brand new sidewalk. The weirdest thing however, were the hundreds of brand new parking meters lining the sidewalks of the empty lots. They were the kind that were installed right after the city privatized the parking meters, but before the company replaced all of them with the pay boxes. I’m telling ya, It was the oddest thing I’ve seen: hundreds of brand new old fashioned parking meters blinking “EXPIRED” in the middle of this vast empty grid.
Right through the middle of all this is the pink line, then a cluster of three random attached homes that seem to be inhabited. Seriously they are the only three buildings in blocks. I don’t know what these owners did to save their homes or what they did to get skipped by the meter machine. One one side of the homes is the elevated pink line tracks and on the other side is some weird run down garden/park with decaying, paint chipped red benches.
This urban twilight zone continues in a checker pattern past Damen and up to Western. By the time I wound up near Western and Odgen, I had been biking around creeped out and completely fascinated for about an hour. Then I saw a row of tiny houses a block before Western on 13th and pedaled over to investigate. They were for real small almost like cottages, cottages in Munchkinland. The blocks of houses were all dead ends because they were right up against the Metra tracks and most of them were boarded up but some of them looked like people lived in them. As I was turning around at the dead end at the end of block, I heard voices coming from the next block over and decided to go see if I could talk to someone and hopefully get some sort of back story to the neighborhood.
I rolled up onto two older guys hanging out on the sidewalk drinking beer. They were talking to a couple of younger guys sitting in a car parked in front of the house. That was the other thing about these Munchkin cottages; they were tiny houses on tiny lots. They pretty much had no yard- front, back, side, none. It was house, front steps, fence, sidewalk. I asked the men about what used to be where the Pink Line tracks are. One of the guys was sitting in a chair and seemed to own the place. “Homes,” he said. I asked what happened to them and he told me that all that land is owned by UIC and the state had bought it up and demolished everything. When I asked him about the strange houses he said a lot of the homes that were demolished were just like the homes on that block and that they were all 130 years old.
Stupid UIC. First Little Italy, then Maxwell Street and now a whole entire neighborhood of historic homes! I’ve never seen houses like that in Chicago or anywhere. They were pretty much some of the coolest homes I’ve ever seen. Just thought I’d share the bizarro world I saw today. Good Night.
