davidschalliol

It’s a stark divide. In front of me, a man snores softly among a pile of beer bottles, yet somehow manages to sit upright on the edge of a slab of broken cement, not far from the edge of the crumbling bridge I’m standing on. Just beyond the bridge and barely 30 feet below lies a line of townhouses; each easily sold for over half a million. They stand sentinel-like, crowding each other, overlooking an old, unused elevated railroad embankment. Between the snoring man and I lie old rails, overgrown grass, and gravel. To the east, Chicago’s downtown skyline towers over the flat Midwest expanse. Welcome to The Bloomingdale Trail.

This past Tuesday, a major fire gutted an abandoned warehouse in Chicago. More than 50 fire companies and nearly 200 firefighters were summoned to the scene to battle the blaze. What's interesting is that temperatures in the area were so low that the water used to put out the fire quickly froze, turning the building into a giant block of ice.