Ogden Avenue, named after William Butler Ogden, Chicago’s first mayor, was at one time a major four-lane diagonal that sliced from Lincoln Park all the way to Naperville. Other than Archer it was the only way to head southwest out of the city: most of Chicago’s diagonal streets–Clark, Clybourn, Elston, and Lincoln– head northwest, away from downtown. But Ogden’s status as a favored thoroughfare collapsed when the expressways came. Its northeast end has been vanishing, a few blocks at a time, for 25 years. A companion and I spent a couple of hours trying to retrace its path.
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We pulled into the parking lot of Terry’s Red Hots on the corner. Until the mid-80s the angled patch of blacktop that borders one side of the stand had been Ogden. I asked Suphot Chongulia, the Thai immigrant who’s owned Terry’s since 1968, if he remembered the road. He did. “In most countries the government wants to open more roads, to expand them,” he said, looking at where Ogden used to pass under the Ravenswood tracks. “I’ve never seen any other country where they close down a road.”
Until the late 60s Ogden continued northeast to the intersection of Clark and Armitage, helping to form the Old Town Triangle District (with North Avenue on the south and Clark Street on the east). Buildings were razed in the early 20s so that Ogden could extend through Old Town to Lincoln Park, but houses and parks were later built back over it. Today the Triangle is one of Chicago’s most prized enclaves. Saint Michael’s Church, the Triangle’s anchor tenant, dominates several blocks. Brick sidewalks and narrow, tree-bordered streets are tranquil despite their close proximity to the noisy intersection of North and Wells. Century-old row houses blend with newer town homes. Throughout the neighborhood, remnants of Ogden still hide: the oddly shaped park at Menomonee and Hudson, the courtyard on Lincoln, where Ranalli’s serves pizza outdoors in summer.
Ogden traffic that had once flowed freely from Division and Halsted–the foot of Cabrini–northeast to Clark and Lincoln Park West was now detoured at North Avenue. Drivers coming from the south on Ogden could continue north on Larrabee, but their momentum would sputter with the narrower street’s lower speed limit and sudden stop signs. The east end of North Avenue had been closed into a cul-de-sac where it once met Lake Shore Drive, so drivers were coaxed to turn west toward the crummy industrial corridors along the river. Some of the north-south streets that had crossed into the Triangle were blocked by a median strip along North. And east-west streets in the Triangle were blunted into cul-de-sacs at Wells, making the neighborhood even more secluded. (The same sorts of tricks helped insulate the University of Chicago campus from the poverty that surrounds it.)
