Legend has it that Chicago’s downtown would have evolved on the southeast side if it hadn’t been for an army engineer’s love for a fur trader’s daughter. When it was time to designate a site for Fort Dearborn, the engineer chose the mouth of the Chicago River over that of the more accessible and navigable Calumet so he could be near his beloved.
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“Every neighborhood has its myths,” says historian Dominic Pacyga, a professor at Columbia College. Pacyga and Washington High School history teacher Rod Sellers collaborated on Chicago’s Southeast Side, a pictorial history of the area south of 79th Street.
In the southeast side’s heyday, the steel mills’ blast furnaces lit up the night sky, and a fine rust-colored dust covered everything. During mealtimes and shift changes the streets filled with people. At one time 17 movie theaters served the area.
