Question asker Ryne Holmquist has spent many hours traversing the Dan Ryan Expressway from Chicago to Northwest Indiana. Curious City editors and producers condensed his questions into this:It’s a broad question to be sure, so it helped to know that Ryne was particularly interested in why the expressway was constructed in the first place, and a little about whether the area’s racial makeup changed.And here’s where we — four University of Chicago undergraduates — step in.

It is a very dynamic system that we call this Dan Ryan Expressway.”Get the flash player here: http://www.adobe.com/flashplayerQuestion asker Ryne Holmquist has spent many hours traversing the Dan Ryan Expressway from Chicago to Northwest Indiana. No one was going to fight for a little 5-room cottage tucked away by the railroads that still had steam locomotives running through, spilling steam and cinders on you. In 1961, it was renamed after Dan Ryan Jr., the former president of the Cook County Board of Commissioners and a strong proponent of expressways.When it opened in 1962 the Dan Ryan promptly became host to shenanigans.We learned some of these accounts from Andy Plummer, a transportation historian who documents the Cook Expressways on his “The thing I remember about the Dan Ryan was that there was a vendor that came onto the expressway using the ramp,” he says. South of 66th Street, the freeway meets the Chicago Skyway, which travels southeast; the I-90 designation … Then it migrated west.”But what about Ryne’s interest in the racial makeup of the area? Protesters raise their fists in honor of George Floyd during a … Sanborn map of 46th & Wentworth circa 1895. “Now a little farther south in the 70s and 80s where the Dan Ryan cut through the bungalow belt built in the 1920s, there was some opposition,” Bruce says. Question asker Ryne Holmquist has spent many hours traversing the Dan Ryan Expressway from Chicago to Northwest Indiana. This area was demolished for the expressway.

“With basically the closing down of the [Union] Stock Yards and the shutting down of Pullman, those kinds of things … had more effect on [periphery neighborhoods] than the expressway.”Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps (compiled by student Sam Brandt) suggest Plummer’s got a point. What the campaign didn’t mention is that Daley’s father was the one who chose the Dan Ryan Expressway name in the first place, according to Ryan … The Dan Ryan Expressway was originally designed to run through Bridgeport, the neighborhood of the elder Mayor Daley. These giants, though, weren’t slain by a behemoth expressway alone. But, he says, he wanted to know more. By 1970, the boundary between blacks and whites had shifted several blocks west, along the Pennsylvania Railroad and encompassing the area now occupied by the Dan Ryan.But Dennis McClendon’s map, which incorporates data drawn from the 1950 census, suggests that blacks were moving west before the expressway was finished. “It has a kind of dynamic where you can either be a part of it or you can be separated from it. Aerial shot of the newly constructed Dan Ryan Expressway, 1960s, from Chicago Transit Authority. Aerial shot of the newly constructed Dan Ryan Expressway, 1960s, from Chicago Transit Authority. “Because, ‘You know, my father built this beautiful two-flat and we’ve taken care of it and we don’t want to go.’ ”Compare this to what happened during the 1970s, when Chicago was pushing for the Crosstown Expressway (never built). And even if you were driving alone, you had a lot of company; each day, more than 250,000 drivers zip along the 9-mile long stretch, which moves south from Roosevelt Road to 95th Street.Come to think of it, maybe you’d be impressed even if your tires never touched the expressway’s pavement.Well, the Dan Ryan’s inspired several Curious City questions, the bulk of them from Ryne Holmquist of Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood.
The next alignment, the most prevalent through the 30s and 40s was basically along State Street.