Chicago Death Ride

On a cold December day I set out on my little bicycle to tour two of the deadliest spots in the United States, where fun-lovers trying to escape their drudgeries met an untimely death under the misanthropy of modern invention – an apt analogy for the plight of the urban cyclist in a city where cars occupy bike lanes with the impunity of an invading alien race.




Bitter, much? Me? Heavens no. I just had a few close calls with brick walls lately, and it got me thinking about mortality, I guess, and hey, do these wine bottles look like severed limbs to anybody else?

I wanted some perspective into the historical nature of mechanically-induced endings, so I started my adventure at The Liar's Club, over on Fullerton Ave, right by the North Branch of the Chicago River.

It's an auspicious place to start a death ride because there have been at least two (possibly three) gnarly murders above this bar, and both (and possibly the third) occurred in view of that second-floor window that's partially obstructed by the sign.

I couldn't find any articles on the third murder, and I don't know much about it, but two murders is plenty for one bar.

I didn't spend much time at The Liar's Club because 1) it didn't open 'til 8 and 2) if this were a murder tour I'd be stopping every other block. It's Chicago after all. No, I'm on more of a catastrophe tour; mass deaths caused by negligence or poor design.

Feeling unusually conscious of my well-being, off I went to the Lakefront Trail, the quickest and safest way for a North Sider to get downtown.

The first of two planned stops was the alley behind the old Iroquois Theater, which is now called the Oriental Theater. And boy would I like to have been there for the board meeting on that name change: "Because cultural consciousness is vital to foster healthy language trends in a diverse society, we need to be more respectful towards the pre-colonial peoples who inhabited the land now known as the United States. Therefore, I propose we change the theater name to...."
Nailed it, good work guys.

This average-looking downtown alley, with faux-brick paving, connects Dearborn and State Street, parallel to Randolph.

Though it appears insignificant at a glance, if I took that shot above on December 30th, in 1903, in the background there would be a fresh pile of human bodies twice as tall as that woman in the red coat.

In a Titanic-level statement of hubris, the 1903 building commissioner George Williams proclaimed the Iroquois to be "fireproof beyond all doubt." In a way, he was right, because when there was (inevitably) a fire, the building did not burn – just everything inside did.

The story left to history is that some oily rags caught fire as part of a stage effect, then the stage curtains went up, and shortly after that the lights went out. The blinded capacity-crowd panicked and rushed for the exits, most of which were, of course, locked because the building manager wanted to keep people from sneaking in to the show. Many of the deaths occurred not by fire or smoke, but by trampling or crushing against the doors.

And worse, because the building was both new and rhetorically safe, the fire-escape hadn't been installed yet. So when people on the upper floors rushed out the emergency exits, expecting to find a metal stairway, they instead found nothing but air. One-hundred-fifty people died this way.

In total, over six-hundred people lost their lives that day.

A bit too giddy for being in such a haunted place, I told the first person I saw in the alley about the Iroquois's macabre history. He walked away from me and out the other side very quickly and yelled back, "Man, I was just gonna ask you for a cigarette!"

Despite being a pretty nice looking alley, people don't hang out back here much, compared to the other downtown alleys. I guess we sense the ancient violence or something. Also as far as I can tell there are no plaques that describe what happened here, just pictures of the local newscasters, encased in scratch-resistant plastic. I guess the history is probably a bit of a buzz-kill to people waiting for tickets to get into the broadway rendition of "The Lion King."

With a good taste of ghastly air in my lungs, I thought to wash it out with a goodie from Chicago's Cupcake ATM.

As you can imagine, using the device (which is really just a re-branded vending machine) required me to take off my gloves, giving me the opportunity to experience the tactile event called Chicago in Winter, up close. Though my hand didn't freeze to the machine like in the movies, that's only because in the time between me taking off my gloves and touching the computer screen, they'd already frozen solid.

Here's a pro tip for anybody that uses emergency hand warmers: cut a slit in the top with a scissors.

The factory's "Tear Here" slit can be hard to manipulate, especially with numb, frozen hands. Sometimes, like in the picture below, the mylar packaging will flex instead of tearing open.

Prepping with your own little slit fixes that problem.

There, now you've learned something. Onwards to the next Deathly Hallow!

If you scroll all the way back up to the top of this post, that boat sitting sideways in the water in front of the Merchandise Mart is the SS Eastland.

I'll let the SS Eastland Disaster website fill in the basic plot points:

The boat really shouldn't have been out that day: it was known to be top-heavy and lacked sufficient ballast, and it probably wasn't boarded with the utmost care. When it first started listing from side to side, the passengers thought it was a joke. Then, like a pig in mud, it suddenly rolled over, trapping some in their cabins and launching others off the high side. Many people back then couldn't swim, and so one of the worst maritime disasters in history happened at dock, in 20 feet of water, between LaSalle and Clark Street bridges.

As you can see in the picture above, they still use the site as a dock for boat tours.

Curiously, there's no plaque or anything mentioning that deadly shipwreck, but there is a plaque for some other shipwreck that happened elsewhere:

Weird.

Though pedestrians swarm the dock area during the summer, in December the esplanade is a pretty nice place to ride a bike.

I don't know what exactly I was hoping to get out of this morbid excursion. Facing the usual recklessness of braindead motorists on my cold ride home I can't say I feel any greater sense of perspective, nor do I feel any luckier to be alive in the twenty-first century, considering in any given year cars will kill more people in Chicago than either the Iroquois Fire or the SS Eastland Disaster. Though both incidents led to sweeping reforms in building and naval codes, there hasn't been a whole lot of progress on the streets.

Except I guess we have bike lanes now: