The view looking North from 18th street on the Dan Ryan South Expressway, as officials and guests gathered for a dedication ceremony which officially opened the expressway in December 1962.
Ald. Bernard Prusinski, 32nd, looks at a map of the Northwest Expressway project which runs through his ward on May 16, 1956. Like many of the early suburbs, Park Forest was accessible to the city via commuter railroad. But other new homes, especially as suburbia gave way to exurbia and beyond, were being built at some distance from the towns that clustered around Chicago’s railroad lines.Daniel Burnham’s 1909 Plan of Chicago suggested the answer: a series of superhighways radiating out from the city.
According to the city’s Department of Urban Renewal, 3,472 families and 1,695 solitary dwellers lost their homes when the Congress Expressway was built.At the other end of the expressways, alums of Chicago apartment buildings raised their children in split-level homes with backyards and swing sets. Kids rode bicycles to school without adults worrying. The Weber grill and a station wagon were the totems of the suburban good life.
The Kennedy runs just west of Old Town, a community that successfully opposed the building of an expressway along North Avenue that would have bisected the gentrifying neighborhood. A 3-mile section of the Dan Ryan Expressway was opened Dec. 12, 1961. Wielding scissors are Mayor Richard J. Daley, Dan Ryan III, Marcy Ryan, Gov. Otto Kerner, John J. Duffy, county board President William Mortimer, county highway Superintendent and County Commissioner Seymour Simon. Mrs. Dan Ryan stands with her two grandchildren.
Just east of the Dan Ryan, from 39th to 54th streets, the Robert Taylor Homes —28, 16-story public housing buildings — were constructed. Life for its 27,000 residents was light-years different from the middle-class suburbs that lined the Kennedy ExpresswayIn 1986, a Tribune reporter seeing children on a concrete playground on the grounds of the Taylor Homes wrote: “Bodies tangle scrambling over benches that have no seats and dodging the rusted swing set without a single seat.
The MSA has 9.6 million people.