Pearl Schaaff remembers life before the Chicago Skyway, remembers the old immigrant neighborhood of two-flats and bungalows filled with steelworkers walking to the mills that belched smoke into the Midwest sky.
The 85-year-old remembers old families, football games in Calumet Park, chickens that roamed on a little neighborhood farm as the trains clattered by.
Then came the mid-1950s, when houses were torn down and an elevated roadway went up, 7.8 miles of steel and concrete that sailed over a swath of gritty southeast Chicago, a toll road to Indiana and the east.
“People didn’t want it. But what are you going to do?” asked Schaaff as she sat in the living room with her husband, Julius, on the second floor of their two-flat home on Avenue M near 100th Street, the noise from the skyway chasing away the silence.
The skyway isn’t just any road. It has a history, a personality, a story that is as big as the dreams of the post-war road builders and as small as an elderly woman reliving an era and yearning for life the way it was and will never be again.
And the road is being reborn, providing a chance to reflect on its importance and legacy, from real engineering to financial engineering, road building to road leasing.
At last, a five-year $250 million skyway reconstruction project is complete, with Wednesday due to mark the opening of three lanes of travel the entire length of the roadway, although construction continues on ramps to the Dan Ryan Expressway. The skyway has new overpasses, viaducts, entry ramps and a bridge deck.
And soon, the city-owned skyway will have a new operator, ending decades of being floated by debt and bailouts.
Chicago has agreed to a $1.82 billion deal to lease the roadway for 99 years to the Cintra-Macquarie Consortium, a Spanish-Australian group. The deal is due for completion in January.
There may be a high-speed, high-stakes future ahead for the road. But there are some in the old neighborhood who remember the past, the look and feel of a massive post-war construction project.
“It was something to watch that road being built,” Schaaff said, remembering the noise made nearly half a century ago by giant cranes that once dotted the landscape. “Why, you would think the whole world was coming to an end.”
In way, a world did come to an end when the skyway was erected, as a wave of road building wrought change in Chicago and the nation, with toll roads and interstates crisscrossing the country.
For nearly half a century, the skyway has been a landmark and a gateway for Chicago, eventually serving as a connector from the Dan Ryan Expressway to the Indiana Toll Road.
“The road is representative of the Southeast Side and the history of the city,” said John Pope, the 10th Ward alderman whose sprawling district includes a portion of the road. “There was so much steel and concrete and labor involved in building the road.”
It was called the Calumet Skyway, budgeted for $88 million, built for more than $100 million and opened in April 1958.
Its elevated route sliced through Chicago and connected with the Indiana Toll Road. It was promoted as a last link that provided a continuous 800-plus mile route to the eastern seaboard via toll roads. It was billed to the city’s taxpayers as a necessary improvement that would alleviate traffic where the Indiana Toll Road ended and the city streets began.
At an opening luncheon, Mayor Richard J. Daley lauded bankers, engineers, public officials, contractors and workers, according to a Chicago Tribune article.
“Chicago is grateful to all of you,” he said. “This improvement is a monument to the `I Will’ spirit of Chicago such as rebuilt the city after it was destroyed by the great fire (of 1871).”
The first paying customer on the roadway was Alvira Rayfield, a hospital technician on her way to South Bend, Ind.
She paid a quarter.
It’s now $2 for cars.
From nearly the beginning, though, the road was a financial bust. Expected revenues from the tolls didn’t match the bond payments for years. The city made several failed attempts to unload the roadway, offering it to the Interstate Highway System or including it in the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority.
It was the building of the interstates, free roads, which doomed the financial base of the skyway as drivers bypassed the tolls on the new routes.
“Almost immediately, the skyway was eclipsed by the Interstate Highway System. The city took it on and was immediately confronted with a loser,” said Dave Schulz, director of the Infrastructure Technology Institute at Northwestern University. “They knew they were in trouble within 18 months of opening.”
The roadway got a new boost in the mid-1990s, though, with the opening of floating casinos in Northwest Indiana.
There is a stark, almost brutal beauty to the road, especially on the drive over the 10-story high bridge that crosses the Calumet. Below is old Chicago, industrial, brawny, tugs and barges in the waterway, piles of salt and coal on the shore, an old railroad lift in the foreground. And rising in the north, Chicago’s skyline, manmade majesty on the prairie.
“Every time I go over it I wish there was a pullout to stop and take pictures,’ said Rod Sellers, a retired schoolteacher and Southeast Side historian. “When the road first opened, you’d probably see all kinds of smoke pouring out of the steel mills. You won’t see any of that now.”
The economy has changed. But the streets and neighborhoods around the road retain their unique flavor, rising up around the traffic, squat apartments, brick bungalows and two-flats overlooking the roadway as it traverses Chicago.
Here, near the toll plaza, the Chicago Vocational Career Academy, where thousands of students wander hallways between classes and look out from classrooms that back to the road.
There, on South Chicago, the W.G.N. Flag and Decorating Co., in a brick factory building and in business since 1916, hard by the railroad tracks and the skyway.
It’s where Carl Porter Jr., 60, is the third generation of his family to run the firm–his son will be the fourth. Porter remembers life before the skyway because, he said, the empty land was once his playground where he and friends built forts.
“I remember the noise of the building of the road,” Porter said. “The digging. The bulldozers. Then, we heard the sound of cars instead of the sound of the trains.”
And stop by Avenue M, nearly beneath the skyway’s 10-story high bridge across the Calumet. It’s a little neighborhood surrounded by a big road. A few blocks down, beneath the skyway, there’s an M-60 tank and a garden by a war memorial to the neighborhood’s men and women “who answered our country’s call in all of the great wars.”
Workers are nearby, the last of the construction crews tying up the loose ends of the long-term repair project.
“I’m proud of it. It’s a monumental task to get this much work done,” said Pete Djukic, 50, a project superintendent for F.H. Paschen General Contractors, which redid the inbound lanes on the high bridge.
“Awesome bridge,” said Mark Buttgereit, 41, a plumber from Naperville, among the crew fitting drains, “I’ve never seen a bridge move so much. Every few hundred feet there is an expansion joint.”
The wind, that’s what Leo Leonard, 38, a plumber from Orland Park, recalls of working on the roadway.
“As soon as you get above the railroad tracks it’s a whole new world,” said Leonard, as he prepared to be hoisted more than 50 feet in a lift to the underside of the bridge.
The old world remains below.
In the neighborhood.
On summer days, Dean Olson, 45, can be found floating in his back-yard pool, looking up at the trucks and cars speeding by.
He doesn’t mind.
Over the last few years of road building, Olson said he and his neighbors have lived with noise, dirt, once even a road sealant that washed down on the neighborhood’s cars when the wind shifted.
But it’s still Olson’s home, skyway and all.
“You don’t think much about it,” he said. “You just look up and, well, there it is.”
