Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway (Center Books on Chicago and Environs) Review

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Along the Divide: Photographs of the Dan Ryan Expressway (Center Books on Chicago and Environs) ReviewJay Wolke says in his short introduction that he took thousands of photos, between 1981 and 1985, of this serpent like highway and there is a stunning one on page thirty-three which sums up the book for me. Taken in 1982 at Exit 57B it shows downtown in the middle distance and the Dan Ryan pointing to it like an arrow. The massive width of the four inner express and three outer distributor lanes plus the Red Line CTA railway sandwiched in the middle really comes across and it's easy to appreciate how this huge construction project cut South Side Chicago in half for almost twelve miles.
Other beautifully composed photos capture the highway and the surrounding environment, bridges, on and off ramps, scrap yards, the extensive human activity beneath the elevated sections. A nice touch, I thought, were several showing the Dan Ryan from windows of buildings along the route. Of the sixty (mostly landscape) photos there are several that I thought didn't quite work though. These are close-ups of moving vehicles and could have been taken on any city expressway. As well as a visual journey along the concrete there is an interesting fifteen page essay by Dominic Pacyga about the planning, building and current status of Dan Ryan.
The book's production is the classic photo book style: generous wide margins and well printed in a fine screen on matt paper. There is the usual annoyance of having all the one line captions at the back rather than under each photo and there is a rather inadequate small map of the route on a page facing the captions. This, I think, would have worked so much better it was over a spread with small thumbnails of each photo arrowed into it.
Along the Divide came across as an almost but not quite book for me. If the editorial flow had been organized differently, with more of the stunning photos (though less of the anywhere ones) and Pacyga's excellent text integrated with a more substantial map it could have been an almost perfect book about a part of America's man-made landscape.
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