"Almost"

Yesterday, I did my “almost” bike ride, going from 92^nd Street on the Southeast Side of Chicago up into Evanston.  This means I almost went from the Indiana border to Wisconsin, give or take some miles here and there.

The south leg of the ride is the most interesting, at least for this historian.  A few years ago, the city of Chicago extended Lake Shore Drive down to 95^th Street, with a bike path included.  The street and path cut through what appears to be hundreds of acres of undeveloped land.  Off to the west, rising out of the weeds and wild flowers is a Gothic church that looks like it could be in rural France or Germany.  That’s St. Michael the Archangel, and I was riding through the site of U.S. Steel’s South Works, which donated the steel that made the towering majesty of St. Michael’s possible.  The plant was closed in the 1990s and all buildings razed.

There are two clues of the land’s steelmaking past—a slip and two walls.  The slip allowed ore boats to pull in off Lake Michigan and unload their cargo into a massive crib.  Two 25- to 30-foot high walls from that crib run parallel to the slip, which has to be close to 1,000 feet long.  Steel-making may be one of the noisiest activities on the face of the earth.  You can hear the birds sing where the blast furnaces once roared at South Works.

Further north, I passed the two public golf courses Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to turn into a stop for the PGA; the old South Shore Country Club course in particular looked busy, as it always does.  Then I went through Jackson Park, where a very long time ago the father of Lou Gehrig’s wife used to run concessions.  At the north edge of the park is the Museum of Science and Industry, that hearty survivor of the Columbian Exposition of 1893.  North of that is McCormick Place and north of that Navy Pier, where the “Law and Order” actor Jerry Orbach went to school; so did my sister Barb.  North of the Pier was a lot of sand and water, all the way into Evanston.

My turnaround point is across from Calvary Cemetery, where the writer James T. Farrell is buried.  Farrell probably would have traded in his considerable literary fame (based mostly on the Studs Lonigan trilogy) for a nice ten-year career with his beloved White Sox.  How strange for a South Sider to be laid to rest so far from home.

It was a thought to help propel me back to where I left my car in Hyde Park.