The Chicago Skyway Approach

The Chicago Skyway is a toll bridge and elevated expressway that carries Interstate Ninety and the Indiana Toll Road traffic from the Indiana state line into the South Side of Chicago, running at a height sufficient to clear the steel mills and industrial infrastructure below it. It opened in nineteen fifty-eight, financed by revenue bonds rather than state funds, which made it a tollway from the beginning. The city of Chicago leased it to a private operator in two thousand five for one point eight billion dollars, one of the first major long-term privatizations of existing American public infrastructure.

The industrial South Side that the Skyway crosses, the Calumet region, was one of the largest steel-producing areas in the world from the eighteen eighties through the nineteen seventies. The mills are mostly gone. The infrastructure they left, the slag pits, the contaminated waterways, the heavy-industrial zoning, is still being addressed.

The Potawatomi people, who had lived on the southern Lake Michigan shore for centuries, ceded their land in this region by the Treaty of Chicago in eighteen thirty-three. Five years later, in eighteen thirty-eight, Potawatomi bands from Indiana were forcibly marched west under the Indian Removal Act. The march is called the Potawatomi Trail of Death.

About one in twenty of the roughly nine hundred people on the march died. Chicago was incorporated as a town that same year, eighteen thirty-three, five years before the Trail of Death removal. The city's history does not typically lead with that chronology.

From the Skyway you can see the downtown skyline, the Willis Tower, formerly the Sears Tower, the Hancock Center, rising to the north in a density that looks nothing like the South Side industrial landscape immediately below.