The day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered will always be a vivid memory to me. That morning I drove downtown to Pier 66 Marina, which was located beneath Marina Towers.
I had two repair jobs that I expected would take me the better part of the day. I took my tools and walked far back into the boat storage area. I had taken a lunch with me, and I worked all day on the two small yachts. At about 4:30 p.m., I finished up and walked to the marina office. I was quite surprised to find it closed and locked with no one around.
Shortly thereafter a security guard hurried up to me asking how I had gotten onto the property. I told him that I had been there all day. He informed me that Dr. Martin Luther King had been shot in Memphis that morning and that riots were starting around the city. He explained that the mayor had ordered that all offices and businesses in the Loop close, and that everyone should leave the downtown area. The guard explained that the order had come down at about noon and that by 3 p.m. the Loop was like a ghost town with only police and security personnel there.
I hurriedly loaded my tools into my vehicle and the guard let me out of the gate onto Kinzie Street. As I drove down the deserted streets, I tuned my radio to a news station and was shocked by the tense reporting of rioting taking place around the city. I drove to Grand Avenue and then turned down onto Lower Wacker Drive, intending to go home via the Congress Expressway.
Listening to the radio, I became aware that most of the really bad rioting was taking place along Madison, and a news reporter related that there were reports of cars being attacked on the Congress Expressway. That bit of news caused me to turn south onto the Dan Ryan Expressway, which I took to the new Stevenson Expressway, where I turned southwest toward home.
By that time I had listened to enough reports on my radio to have an understanding that many buildings along Madison had been torched by the rioters and that the firefighters were being kept away by the riots. I took note that the fires started just to the east of Western, and the worst fires were around the intersections of Madison and Western and Madison and Pulaski.
As I approached and passed Western on the elevated portion of the Stevenson Expressway, I could clearly see the smoke rising straight up in the air from each separate fire.
The news reporters were very accurate in their reporting as I could plainly see the row of fires along Madison with many clustered closely around the Western and the Pulaski intersections with Madison. There were other sporadic fires on the horizon, but nothing like the line of smoke columns that climbed high into the sky from the dozens of large fires on Madison.
The expressway was empty and it was an eerie feeling as if I was the only one who was able to witness this history unfolding before my eyes.
When I arrived back in Lyons everything appeared rather normal, and I was a bit surprised that no one was affected by the huge disaster that was rolling through the West Side of Chicago.
To this day, many people are not aware of the total devastation that occurred on the West Side, and how Chicago quickly moved to contain the situation and keep it out of the heart of the city.
