Beefcake on the Harrowing Highway Across Chicago's South Side

The South Side of Chicago is rough.  Industrial, highways everywhere, horrendous air quality, crime rampant.  I've passed through it a hundred times, on the way to my parents' relatives in Indiana, and recently on the way to New York, and varies between awful and horrible.  You just have to brace yourself for an hour of torture.

But there are settlements along the way, towns where people live and go to work, where guys take their shirts off.  Maybe thinking about that will make the trip a bit more endurable.












If you take Interstate 80 across, the highway starts to become horrifying at Harvey: 6 lanes in either direction, with dozens of other highways merging and splitting off, and a high wall preventing you from seeing anything but concrete, billboards, and the smokey white sky.  I 80 turns into I 294 (toll), long lines to take a ticket, mostly stuck behind massive trucks.






1. Harvey.  Straddling the north side of I 294.  25,000 people, 33% under the poverty level.  It's the home of massive railroad terminals and industrial parks, and an abandoned shopping mall.  One public high school, no gyms in town except for the YMCA where this guy works out.














2. East Hazel Crest. Straddling the south side of I 294, with a railroad yard on the west side, Highway 1 on the east, and Homewood Disposal on the south.  There's a police department, a Bible Church, and a hot dog stand.  I couldn't find any beefcake photos; when I tried, all that came up were pictures of houses.

3. South Holland.  Straddling the north side of I 294 until you get to the horrible I-94 exchange. With high walls separating you from the towns, you never know that you are passing through the Wampum Lake Woods.  People stop there to fish and then post pictures of themselves with fish on the lake woods website.









4. Lansing, Illinois, where the I-294 becomes the I-94, and traffic comes to a standstill as you inch toward the Indiana border.  Mostly gigantic trucks.  The noise and smell are horrible.  You'd never know that the town of Lansing is actually quite pleasant, with not a lot of poverty and not much crime.  And a high school wrestling team.







5. Hammond, Indiana. You're relieved because you're out of Illinois, 30 miles from the Loop.  Surely the traffic will thin out now, right?  Wrong -- it gets worse.  And the blight gets real.

Hammond, population 80,000, extends all the way up to the Lake.  An old industrial town, it is subject to unemployment, poverty, crime, and a decaying infrastructure.  There are 4 high schools: Clark, Gavit, Eggers, and Scott. and two colleges, the Calumet College of St. Joseph and a branch of Purdue.  And this bodybuilder.











6. Gary, straddling the I-94 until it hits the I-90 (it will become the I-80 again later).  Even worse, crumbling, desperate, dreary, full of abandoned buildings and vacant houses (so many that they filmed the series Life after People there, about what would happen to our cities if all the humans died).  The childhood home of the Jackson 5.  Known for the song "Gary, Indiana," from The Music Man.

Why do so many of these cities have names that sound like people's first names?  It makes it impossible to do an image search.





7. Portage, Indiana.  You've made it!  The traffic lightens, the walls go away, and you can cruise down the Indiana Tollroad in peace (except there are no rest stops for the next 180 miles).

Of course, you can always skip the I-80-294-94-90, and take the 30 instead.