Chicago is a town with secrets. Beneath the glitz and glimmer of the lake shore, behind the empty facades of knick knack shops and import gurus, and beneath the rumble of trains and the clomp of a thousand feet, stories wait to be discovered. Whispers someone might never find spending an entire life walking these concrete canyons, until they took a wrong turn and let the city swallow them up.
That might sound like an interlude from Jim Butcher’s wildly popular series The Dresden Files, but even Butcher’s lead the infamous wizard-for-hire Harry Dresden hasn’t managed to uncover all the secrets the Windy City has to offer. Both Butcher and Dresden have found one of the more unique parts of the city, though. They call it Undertown… the rest of us call it the Pedway.
What is The Pedway?
The short version is that the Pedway is a series of pedestrian walkways that run underneath over 40 blocks of the Central Business District in and around The Loop. That description doesn’t begin to scratch the surface about the strangeness of this unseen side of Chicago, though. It doesn’t bring across how the Pedway can change from one curve to the next; gleaming and upscale for a few hundred feet, then dipping down into harsh fluorescent lights and dingy cinder blocks the next. This description doesn’t really explain the labyrinthine maze, or how even the best attempts to completely map it can barely help the unfamiliar find their way in and out again.
In the end, it’s best to take a guide (the Chicago Elevated tour found here is phenomenal).
What Makes The Pedway So Strange?
There’s a lot of history that goes into Chicago’s pedestrian tunnels. The short version is that the first tunnels were constructed in 1951 to connect the Red Line and the Blue Line subways at Jackson Boulevard and Washington Street. The idea was, of course, that there was no reason to get off one train, go up to street level, and then walk back down to another station, so the city added a single tunnel. It was straight, simple, and common sense; the last time those words were used to describe the Pedway.
Since 1951 the Pedway has been expanded a little at a time; not by the city but by property owners. Every section of the Pedway has been added independently of the others, creating a massive, subterranean patchwork that can take some serious trekking before pedestrians really understand what portions lead where. With restaurants and gyms, access to apartments and to subway tunnels, if someone can navigate the Pedway then it’s possible for that individual to get all around the city without ever coming up above ground.
How Much Liberty Did Butcher Take?
With the success of The Dresden Files a lot of interest in Chicago’s Pedway, along with other sites like Lower Wacker Drive, has been injected into the reading public. While there are always rumors of everything from lost people to hauntings, the Pedway hasn’t picked up any specters that have stuck. At present it’s an inner-city hedge maze, that happens to have the added benefits of keeping commuters off the streets and protecting people from wind, rain, ice, and snow.
If they can find their way out, that is.
Other Freaky Vacation Destinations
If you’ve never heard of Italy’s Renaissance-era sculpture park full of monsters, then you should check out this article about the Gardens of Bomarzo.
For connoisseurs of haunted houses, this article about the Winchester House (possibly the strangest haunted house in America) should be enough to make you change your travel itinerary.
References
“Pedway- Downtown Pedestrian Walkway System” by Anonymous at City of Chicago
“Does Chicago’s Undertown, as Depicted in Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files Novels, Actually Exist?” by Cecil Adams at Straight Dope
