Bullets or rocks; they both can be scary

There is a portion of Interstate 57 just across the county line from Cook that always manages to put a chill in my spine.



Would you climb high above the industrial Southeast Side of Chicago to fling rocks down upon the Skyway? If you would, you're nuts! Photograph provided by Library of Congress collection.



It is the place where Stuenkel Road passes over the Interstate. There’s nothing unique about the road itself, it is just a country road with nothing around it (unless you get excited by the nearby Governors State University campus). Completely rural and uneventful a place.

EXCEPT, …

I still recall an incident from my police-reporter and court-reporter days just over two decades ago when a crime occurred at that site.

Local kids who were bored and had nothing better to do thought it would be fun to go to the overpass and fling rocks down upon the cars driving at 55 miles per hour (most likely faster) on the interstate.

Their idea of fun, and what some people at the time tried to dismiss as a stupid prank, became a crime when one kid threw a chunk of concrete that hit the hood of a truck, then bounced into the windshield.

AS I RECALL it, the shattered glass managed to decapitate the driver. He died there at Stuenkel Road, and it is a miracle in my mind that his vehicle didn’t manage to take out a few other drivers.

I couldn’t help but recall this moment (which I covered as a police reporter and later as the trial of the teen-aged twits took place in Will County court) when I heard the reports about the incident along the Chicago Skyway that caused Chicago police to shut down traffic and even had them asking Indiana state troopers to help with cutting off traffic in the Hoosier state).

The incident got reported as gunfire coming from a bridge that passes over the Skyway route, with motorists endangered. Hence, police were anxious to keep as many automobiles as possible off of the toll road until they could gain control of the incident.

The area Times of Northwest Indiana newspaper had the headline 6 cars shot on Skyway on the front page of their Thursday editions.

BUT, …

That same newspaper used its website on Thursday to publish the headline Skyway was shut down by rock throwers. Along with a brief story about how a three-mile portion of the Chicago Skyway was affected by people with nothing better to do than fling rocks at passing cars.

Chicago police told the newspaper that their initial call of “shots fired” were later determined to be rocks flung that hit about a half-dozen cars. All the TV-types who got all worked up Wednesday night about gunfire seemed to slink away and say next to nothing when it turned out to be rocks. Even though personally, the latter can be even more deadly.

All of which means some things don’t change. Despite the passage of a couple of decades, it seems some people think it is amusing to fling objects at automobiles, which truly is something I don’t comprehend the point of.

I USED TO have an aunt and uncle who, along with two cousins, lived in the East Side neighborhood (within walking distance of Calumet Park) where we could see the Skyway above us, just a few blocks to the south.

Walking around the neighborhood there invariably involves taking a stroll underneath the road. It is a part of the non-effete nature of the working-class neighborhood. Yes, I realize the neighborhood is a bit rough (which is why those particular relatives now live in the area around Valparaiso, Ind.).

Yet I obviously don’t see the point of the activity of the people who did this (police as of Thursday afternoon didn’t have anyone in custody. Whether they know who they’re looking for is a different question).

It is one of those things that I must admit, whenever I find myself driving along I-57 and passing Stuenkel Road, I find myself thinking about that truck driver and wondering what could have become of his life – had some area kids not been bored.

I ALSO WONDER how this incident will turn out. Because I recall in the Will County case, the judge ultimately found them guilty of a lesser charge so that they would only have to serve a couple of years in prison – even though their victim died.

That was a move that never sat right by me. Personally, I’d like to think that if there really is a “Chicago Way” of doing things (use your best Sean Connery accent imitation when reading that line), that it would involve cracking down as harshly as possible on anyone who ever gets arrested for this incident.

Maybe nobody died Wednesday. But some forms of “fun” need to be cracked down upon to make sure other people learn how stupid they are. Although I must confess that there is a part of me who thinks the ultimate (and appropriate) punishment for these people might have been if they had fallen from their perch above Chicago with a perfect perspective of the Illinois-Indiana state line.

Because that’s quite a climb above ground. At the very least, the fall might have knocked some sense into them!

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South suburbs have changed, and people should change their perception w/ it

It has been an intriguing six-day period for the suburban area south of Chicago.

QUINN: Is his talk cheap?



Gov. Pat Quinn has actually deemed the area that is an extension of Chicago’s great Sout’ Side worthy of his attention three times in the past few days.

ONCE WAS TO see that the old Dixie Square shopping center in Harvey was really being torn town, a second time in Hazel Crest to use a local school to announce a series of school-related projects the state would pay for, and a third time on Monday to be present for the unveiling of the new Tuskegee Airmen Memorial Trail signs that will be erected on Tuesday along the Cook County portion of I-57.

Quinn even seems to have some set rhetoric that he uses whenever he is in the municipalities that developed south of  95^th Street (or 119^th Street, or 138^th Street, whichever one you consider to be the southern “end” of Chicago) to make it sound like he cares about the area.

“If you put the south suburbs together, you would have one of the largest cities in America,” Quinn has said – which is sort of true. Depending on how one defines “south suburb” (as opposed to southwest suburb, west suburb, northwest or north suburb), the area can have about 500,000 people – which is almost the size of Milwaukee).

But, of course, nobody puts all those municipalities of 10,000 to 35,000 people each into one cohesive unit. Plus, the same fact could easily be said of the west suburbs or north suburbs.

THEY WOULD MAKE significant cities if they were considered as semi-entities, instead of individual communities -- certainly larger than anything found in "downstate" Illinois.

So I’m not convinced that the sudden surge of attention from Quinn and the state is going to change much of anything about the region – which I will admit I have a special interest in because I have lived there.

Much of my own life has been spent moving back and forth between city and suburb (with the occasional move outside the Chicago area to a politically-motivated community such as Springfield, Ill., or Washington, D.C.).

What makes the south suburbs stand out when it comes to suburbia is the fact that they truly are an off-shoot of Chicago’s South Side – which in recent decades developed neighborhoods that are almost entirely African-American.

SO DURING THE past decade when many of those African-American city residents became tired of city life and decided to move elsewhere, it may be true that some decided to go back “down South” (ie., Atlanta).

But many of those roughly 180,000 African-Americans who left Chicago in the past decade (according to the Census Bureau population count completed last year) are now living in those south suburbs.

Many communities in the south suburbs have developed majority African-American populations. The south suburbs is now just as important a region for black political empowerment as any Chicago South Side or West Side neighborhood.

Which is what causes many people to be scared off of taking the area seriously when it comes to economic development.

IT LEADS TO the very real conditions that Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill., likes to talk about when he gives speeches. Invariably, he will talk about how the Bishop Ford Freeway is a messy traffic jam headed northbound during the morning rush hour, but that the southbound lanes are ever so empty.

Everybody feels the need to leave the southern area (and for that matter, the far South Side of Chicago proper) in order to gain any kind of significant employment.

Because of my own ties to the area, it is why I personally am rooting for people like Jackson whenever they talk about initiatives that might actually draw positive attention to the area (such as his plans to turn the area around 111^th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue into a national park honoring the old legacy of the Pullman railroad cars that once were built there).

Anybody who ever has been to that area would realize it still has such a historic feel to it that it could be an attraction – just as the few blocks surrounding what once was Abraham Lincoln’s home in Springfield, Ill., has become.

UNLESS PEOPLE LET their racial hang-ups get the best of them. That could be the biggest impediment to anything serious being done in the way of development for the area.

Will they become a tribute, or a barrier?



Which is why I am curious to see how the renaming of I-57 from 99^th Street down to Sauk Trail near suburban Matteson plays out in the public eye. Lots of people on Monday used ceremonies in suburban Markham to make grandiose statements. But will them mean them?

Or will there be a predominance of people who will take the fact that the one-time Calumet Expressway is now the Bishop Ford Freeway (named for long-time Church of God in Christ presiding bishop L.H. Ford) and that I-57 is now named for the Tuskegee Airmen of World War II fame and interpret that to mean that these two African-American tributes now establish eastern and western boundaries for black suburbia that they go out of their way to ignore?

If that were to happen, that would be the blow most likely to harm us as a society.

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So. Ill. interstate (finally) gets a name

This observation comes from someone who has driven automobiles from the Illinois/Wisconsin border to just north of that point where Illinois becomes one with Kentucky and Missouri – we in Chicago put names on our interstate highways, while the rest of the state seems content to think of their roads by numbers.

What we call the Stevenson Expressway is what the rest of Illinois prefers to think of as Interstate 55, while Interstate 90 gets called the Jane Addams Highway or the Kennedy Expressway, depending on whether one is south or north of downtown Chicago.

INTERSTATE 94 CAN be more confusing, because many Chicago residents don’t think of it as a single road. Depending on which portion of I-94 one is on, the road is the Edens expressway, the Tri-State Tollway or the Bishop Ford freeway.

The Dan Ryan Expressway is unique, since it comprises both I-94 and I-90.

Of course, one shouldn’t think of Chicago expressways in purely Democratic (or urban) terms. Former presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan are the two Republican recipients of Chicago-area expressways (Interstate 290 and Interstate 88, respectively) named in their honor.

In fact, about the only portion of an interstate highway in Illinois outside of the Chicago area that is named for a human being is that portion of Interstate 70 near East St. Louis known as the McGwire Expressway in honor of the former St. Louis Cardinals’ slugger whose “historic” home run achievement of 1998 only lasted as a record for four years.

Ken Gray, here seen in 1974 with his congressional colleague-turned-president, Gerald Ford, was from an era when representatives boasted of the large amounts of federal money they brought back to their home districts. Now, they get derided for swimming in "pork." Photograph provided by http://www.illinoisstatesociety.org/

WHICH IS WHY I think it is about time that a downstate Illinois portion of an interstate highway gets a politico’s name attached to it.

Ken Gray, the longtime member of Congress from Southern Illinois, gets the honor of being the first.

He is going to have the portion of Interstate 57 that passes through Mount Vernon (about 240 miles south of Chicago, or 150 miles east of St. Louis at the site of the 200-foot-high Christian cross that looms over the interstate) named in his honor. It is not far from his hometown of West Frankfort.

Gray gets the honor in part because he was one of the members of Congress back in 1956 when Eisenhower signed into law the measure that created the concept of interstate highways – and significantly altering the life perspective of people who grew up in towns along U.S. Route 66 (Chicago to Los Angeles) and the Lincoln Highway (New York to San Francisco, passing through Chicago Heights, Ill.).

SOUTHERN ILLINOIS’ POLITICAL observers this week were digging up the old Kenny Gray stories about how he forced Interstate 57 (Chicago to Memphis, then down to New Orleans) to cut through his home region – by threatening to withhold his needed vote for construction of the entire interstate highway system.

Now to some people, that story is everything that is wrong with government today – a political official having a snit fit until a road is built through his community at taxpayer expense. They would take offense at the notion that during 24 years in Congress, Gray was proud to say he brought back $7 billion worth of federal projects to his home district.

But do people really believe the region of Southern Illinois (the portion of the state that lies below Interstate 70) would be better off if there weren’t major highways connecting the region to Chicago, St. Louis and Memphis?

I have driven on some of those rural highways of Southern Illinois, and on a couple of occasions, I have done it in the dark. One of the most terrifying road moments I ever experienced was trying to find the town of Tamms (located 12 miles north of Illinois’ southernmost tip) and winding up in the woods on a rural road (unnamed or numbered, as far as I can tell) just north of Anna. The road that led me to that point apparently used to be fairly common in that region, until the coming of the interstates.

THERE’S ONE PART of the renaming of the interstate portion for Kenny Gray that I find ironic – that it will alter a portion of Interstate 57.

That is the one interstate of the Chicago area that does not have a name of some now-forgotten personage attached to it.

So the one road that Chicago people think of as a number is now the one road that (at least some) downstate residents will think of as a name.

I can already hear the grumbling from Southern Illinois residents whenever they hear a Chicagoan in the future talk about “I-57” – “why can’t those dummies call it the Gray Expressway the way we do,” they’ll say, similar to the way we complain about “half-wit downstaters” who insist on calling it I-55, rather than by its proper name honoring Adlai E., the second.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Here’s a breakdown on all of the interstate highways that pass through Chicago (http://www.jameson.com/chicago_freeway_names.cfm) and help the city maintain its image as the transportation crossroads of the United States.

Ken Gray’s official biography (http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=G000400) as a former member of Congress.

Long-haul truck drivers (http://www.truckingboards.com/trucking/upload/trucking-news/35118-freeway-stretch-named-after-ex-congressman.html) already are taking note of the I-57 name change.