Old Chicago
Bolingbrook, Illinois
Old Chicago Today

 

Back when Old Chicago was built there really wasn't much around it.  Most of Bolingbrook sat on the other side of the Interstate and other than the strip mall and movie theater across the street and a few warehouses there was nothing around Old Chicago but farmland.  These pictures are from the late 1990's and even between now and then the area has seen a drastic change.  I drove through the area earlier this year (2008) and couldn't recognize anything. 

 For example where my family got stuck in the middle of nowhere in our Suburban back in the legendary blizzard of '79 a mile West of Old Chicago now has an exit to the Interstate and there are businesses, gas stations and shopping malls as far as the eye can see.  It reminds me of the Pretenders song "My City Was Gone":

I went back to Ohio
But my pretty countryside
Had been paved down the middle
By a government that had no pride
The farms of Ohio
Had been replaced by shopping malls
And muzak filled the air
From Seneca to Cuyahoga Falls
Said, a,o, oh way to go Ohio

Here's a satellite image of Old Chicago's site from Google Earth as it sits today as a car dealership.  The "T" shaped building is where Old Chicago was and the dealership uses Old Chicago's parking lot on the north, east and south sides of their building with the parking lot to the west added on at a later date.

They paved paradise and put up a parking lot, or more accurately a car dealership.

The Chicago Loop now sits in Canobie Lake Park in New Hampshire as the Canobie Cannonball.  The Old Chicago Log Race is not the log flume at the Texas State Fair. 

All that's left of Old Chicago is just a street sign and our memories.

 

 

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Paul B. Drabek