Quote:
Originally Posted by CTA Gray Line
Does anyone know why the Dan Ryan Expy. alignment is where it is along Wentworth Ave.?
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Because most expressways were routed along rail corridors, and they needed an expressway going south. Putting it in the narrow swath between the Rock Island and the Chicago & Western Indiana railroads was logical, since that area was blighted and did not contain major business districts or neighborhood centers. It was admittedly a racial boundary, but putting the expressway somewhere else would have been more destructive to existing communities and expensive. If we were planning the expressway today, we'd probably put it in the same place, regardless of the skin color of the politicians and planners behind it.
Think about it this way: would the communities in the Black Belt have been better served by a huge hulking viaduct running down the center of King Drive, or a depressed expressway (with a new transit line!) skirting the edge of their neighborhood?
The big exception to the railroad-corridor alignment was the Eisenhower, the first radial expressway, which was built in place of the old Garfield Park branch of the L (imagine tearing up the North Side today with a block-wide trench where the Red Line used to be). That ended up being horrendously expensive, so the planners shifted to the lower-cost land next to noisy, smoky railroads for all future expressways.
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