Here's a 1952 aerial from HistoricAerials.com 1952 aerial photo The North Western's Parkview station was located on the south side of Parkview Terrace, north of Addison St., on the north side of the tracks. It was closed in the great 1958 purge of low-traffic C&NW stations and branches. Here's a guide to lost commuter stations.
Forum: General Discussion

I've wondered about this for many years, and when the Ryan was rebuilt five years ago they made all new signs--but didn't take the opportunity to change it. The situation on I-294 is different because it's only Cermak Rd. in Cook County. In DuPage County, the street signs say 22nd St. I-294 straddles the county line at that point.
Forum: General Discussion

Here's the triangle in 1972, courtesy of HistoricAerials.com The triangle is vacant in the 1988 photos.
Forum: General Discussion

The Belt Railway of Chicago ends as it curves west into the former Milwaukee Road tracks. C&NW's Cragin Industrial Lead runs alongside BRC from 40th St. Yard north through Cragin Yard and on to Mayfair. For some reason, Open Street Map is well-annotated with railroad names and subdivisions in the Chicago area.
Forum: General Discussion

Upload images to a hosting site such as tinypic or imageshack. Copy the URL, click on the mountain icon, and paste in the URL.
Forum: General Discussion

No, Perkins & Will would never have done anything like that. Designed by Belli & Belli, 1963. Belli is known for a number of spectacular Catholic churches of that era, and St. Joseph Hospital.
Forum: General Discussion

High Ridge is mentioned in the 1891 Standard Guide to Chicago, which says it is on the North Western's Milwaukee Division, 8-1/4 miles north of the city hall. That would place it just north of Devon, so I think it must be the station later known as Kenmore, below. Illinois Place Names lists a post office by the name High Ridge on the far north side of the city from 1888 to 1894. A 1915 Chic
Forum: General Discussion

Just make a screen capture and upload it to Tinypic:
Forum: General Discussion

That's curious. The 1925 Sanborn's map shows only shop operations on that side of Pershing, though those shops had a connection to a different railroad. Perhaps the south side was the original plant and the expansion and office building on the even-numbered side of the street came later, in the 20th century.
Forum: General Discussion

I find the "kiosk" interface much faster to use and easier to read. It comes from the same structure database, though. http://maps.cityofchicago.org/kiosk/mpaddress.jsp?maptype=mapsplats_structures
Forum: General Discussion

Same boundary; different bearing. At a point a few miles north of the west end of the Chicago portage route, the boundary line shifted to a more southwesterly angle: See the Early Chicago online encyclopedia: http://www.earlychicago.com/encyclopedia.php?letter=I
Forum: General Discussion

It's Google Maps that is throwing you off. Google uses reverse geocoding to automatically assign approximate addresses to photo locations, but those can't be relied on very heavily. Like most automated mapping programs, it also assumes that addresses are distributed evenly, --00 to --98, along a block. But Chicago addresses traditionally had only 34 addresses per short block and never went past
Forum: General Discussion

I'm not sure how to be any more clear about this. The three-story building at 300 (or 310 or 318 or 330) West Pershing was the office headquarters of the Link-Belt Co, built in 1920. It was never a school. It was never owned by the Board of Education. It was never a parochial school, a kindergarten, a junior college, a conservatory, a gymnasium, a training academy, or any other sort of pedagog
Forum: General Discussion

300-310 W. Pershing was the headquarters of Link-Belt Co., manufacturers of conveyor belt systems and related machinery. In the 1980s and 90s, the Chicago Board of Education was headquartered at 1819 W. Pershing, two miles further west, in the former Army Quartermaster Depot.
Forum: General Discussion

Straight Dope Chicago is a local version of the nationally syndicated column, which appears in the Chicago Reader. They've established an online forum by the same name: http://chicago.straightdope.com/
Forum: General Discussion

Pueblo was part of the "Brennan scheme" that gave streets in one section names beginning with K, streets in the next mile names beginning with L, etc. But such a small portion of the street is wholly within Chicago that the regional name overwhelmed official usage in recent decades.
Forum: General Discussion

In the late 1870s there were plans to make Division Street between Milwaukee Avenue and Humboldt Park a boulevard, which would connect the park to the central city in a manner similar to the South Parkway boulevard. The right of way was widened to 100 feet, rather than the customary 66 feet, but the boulevard improvements were never completed. I think this very subject is likely to be covered
Forum: General Discussion

My living room looks out on the similar bridges at 16th Street. My living room has a poster of the Milwaukee Road Cherry Street bridge. I've taken several pictures of the C&NW Kinzie Street bridge for various publications. I give tours of Chicago's movable bridges. Yes, some of us think Chicago's railroad and industrial heritage is beautiful in its own muscular way:
Forum: General Discussion

Railroad bridges were always black, to save money on steel. Since the span would expand in the sun, they could make the bridge a half-inch shorter. :)
Forum: General Discussion

This railroad line was Chicago's first, the Galena & Chicago Union, which opened in 1848, Later it became part of the Chicago & North Western System, which was purchased by Union Pacific in 1994. The railroad line eventually went all the way east to Navy Pier, though the part east of about Clark was paved over in the 1990s. There's a lot of talk about setting up a busway that would li
Forum: General Discussion

Any city has a fair number of "paper streets," which were dedicated but never built. In the Chicago area, subdivision often ran 20 years or more in advance of actual development. The purchase of forest preserve land starting in 1915 and the Great Depression means that quite a few paper streets around Chicago ended up in forest preserves. Until recently, commercial street maps general
Forum: General Discussion

Because the metal expands and contracts at a different rate than the overlying asphalt, buried streetcar tracks will nearly always work themselves free to daylight.
Forum: Forgotten Chicago Sightings

The more I study it, the less I think it's Chicago. Notice that the leftmost prominent building seems to be at an acute angle to the row of buildings behind the man's shoulder. There are just very few place in Chicago like that. The leftmost building looks at first glance like the Congress Hotel, but nothing else even rings a bell. Another possibility is that the man is on board a ship. Could
Forum: General Discussion

Johnson Ave. is now Brewery Ave. (vacated) Johnson Ave. is now Kedzie Ave. 3100 to 8700S and 10300 to 11499S. Johnson Pl. is now Elmwood Ave. Johnson St. is now Peoria St. 1000 to 2200S. Johnston Ave. is now Lyndale St. 2800 to 3199W. Johnston St. is now Marshfield Ave. 800 to 1200N. Obviously Peoria St was in the Jewish ghetto, so that's presumably the one you're looking for.
Forum: General Discussion

Unfortunately, the history of Chicago's numbered streets is rather murky. It appears that the streets in the South Division were renamed with numbers sometime in the 1850s. Andreas lists (pp. 194-195) the old names and the new ones, but the only date he mentions, rather obliquely, is 1857. The Flower map of 1861 shows numbered streets between 12th and 22nd, but still shows the names south of th
Forum: General Discussion

There may be a problem linking directly to your Flickr account.
Forum: General Discussion

First, host the photo at a website such as Flickr, tinypic, or imgur. Copy the URL that displays your image. On this forum, put that URL in between a (IMG) and (/IMG) tag. (Use square brackets instead of parentheses), like this:
Forum: General Discussion

The principle, as I understand it, was that they worked like a glass floating upside down in water. A sort of moat around the bottom prevented gas from escaping, and the enclosing structure rose and fell depending on the amount of gas inside.
Forum: General Discussion

The picture was in the book.
Forum: General Discussion

In his book Is There Only One Chicago, Kenan Heise writes that it was used by Western Electric to test mobile radar units. Planes from Glenview Naval Air Station would fly over during the tests. This photo is uncredited, but is presumably from Chicago Today:
Forum: General Discussion