Ira Glass

Okay, this happens to be Chicago, but every city has a place like this.

That weird, desolate area at the far end of town.

We're a half mile west of the old abandoned steel mills.

We're a half mile north of landfills where methane fires used to burn.

Just south of the auto junkyard.

Just east of the site of the old city dump.

Where there was a mountain of raw garbage that would stink up the neighborhood whenever the wind would blow in the wrong direction.

Everybody down here called it Mount Passini.

For the Ottoman who let the city put it here.

My guide is Charlie Gregerson, who grew up down here.

He shows me where a lake, like Calumet, used to be back in the 40s when he was a kid.

He'd go fishing on a rowboat with his dad.

Then the city started filling in huge sections of the lake with garbage and incinerator ash.

He'd come here in the 70s and see bulldozers pushing around the rubble of some of Chicago's great buildings, which had been recently demolished.

Louis Sullivan masterpieces, like the Stock Exchange building and the Garrick Theater.

This is where they ended up.

And so there'd be this like Louis Sullivan, you know, terracotta ornament just sticking out there.

Yeah.

And so walking around when there's these, you know, pieces of buildings sticking up, I mean, it just seems like it just must have been such a strange scene, like this apocalyptic, you know, death of a city.

There were once big plans for this area, for canals and waterways, a harbor that never really worked out.