628: In the Shadow of the City

Okay. This happens to be Chicago, but every city has a place like this. That weird, desolate area at the far end of town. We're half mile west of the old abandoned steel mills. We're half mile north of landfills where methane fires used to burn, just south of the auto junkyard, just east of the site of the old city dump, where there was a mountain of raw garbage that would stink up the neighborhood whenever the wind would blow in the wrong direction. Everybody down here called it Mount Pisini, the Ottoman who let the city put it here. You'll notice all these, what would you call it, tire marks. This street is used as, for drag racing year round. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's basically far enough away from the police that they don't don't do anything about it. My guide is Charlie Gregerson, who grew up down here. He shows me where a lake, like Calumet, used to be back in the forties when he was a kid. He'd go fishing on a rowboat with his dad, then the city started filling in huge sections of the lake with garbage and incinerator ash. He'd come here in the seventies and see bulldozers pushing around the rubble of some of Chicago's great buildings, which had been recently demolished. Louis Sullivan masterpieces, like the Stock Exchange Building and the Garrick Theater, this is where they ended up. Now now show me, we're standing here. Where were all the buildings being dumped, and what did that look like? Right here at right here at what was the north end of the dump. And, actually, we picked I picked up a few pieces of, the stock exchange ornament right out of out of the lake. But, of course, most of it had been ground right into the, dirt because they had bulldozers that would just you keep on they would dump the stuff in piles, and the bulldozer would just flatten it all out. And so there'd be this, like, Louis Sullivan, you know, terracotta ornament just sticking out? Out there. Yeah. And so and so walking around when there's these, you know, pieces of building sticking up, I mean, it just seems like it just must have been such a a strange scene, like this apocalyptic, you know, death of a city. Oh, yeah. Well, there were I remember I remember seeing one of these big, Phoenix columns that I knew had come out of the Garrick Theater was just sticking out of the ground. Two of those in the, Garrick Theater distributed the weight of the upper floors that were over the stage. One of those was just sticking out at about a 45 degree angle out of the ground. And and at that point, the Garrick had been gone for almost ten years. There were once big plans for this area, for canals and waterways, a harbor that never really worked out. There's zoning maps of the city …