Archer Avenue

Archer Avenue, also known as Archer Road outside the Chicago, Illinois city limits, is a diagonal thoroughfare running northeast-to-southwest between Chicago's Chinatown and Lockport, Illinois. Archer follows the old portage trail between the Chicago River and the Des Plaines River, and parallels the path of the Illinois and Michigan Canal and the Alton Railroad.

The street was named after the first commissioner of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, William Beatty Archer.^[1] One early map of Chicago^[2] (ca. 1830) listed what may have been the future Archer Road as "The Road to Widow Brown's"^{[nb 1]}.

Archer Avenue was made famous by Finley Peter Dunne in his books and sketches about the fictional saloonkeeper Mr. Dooley, whose tavern was on "Archey Road". The fictional Dooley "lived" in the real-life Bridgeport, Chicago neighborhood.

Archer Avenue is also famous as the purported haunting place of Resurrection Mary, a vanishing hitchhiker who is said to travel between the Willowbrook Ballroom and Resurrection Cemetery.^[4][5]

The east end of Archer begins in Chicago's Chinatown, then passes through the Bridgeport, McKinley Park and Brighton Park neighborhoods on its way to Archer Heights and Garfield Ridge. Outside Chicago, Archer Avenue/Road passes through the villages of Summit, Justice, and Willow Springs before terminating on the north side of Lockport.

The former site of Argonne National Laboratory and its predecessor, the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory in the forest preserve near Red Gate Woods, can be entered from an access road on Archer Avenue.^[6] This was once a secret Manhattan Project site, and is now known as the Site A/Plot M Disposal Site. Chicago Pile-1 (CP-1), the world's first nuclear reactor, was moved from Stagg Field to this site in 1943 and renamed Chicago Pile-2 (CP-2). The remains of CP-1, CP-2, and Chicago Pile-3 (CP-3) remain buried at this site.

Playland Park, a now-shuttered amusement park, was once a prominent feature along Archer Avenue in what is now Justice.^[7]

Notes

1. ^ "There is a dispute about the route taken from Chicago to Widow Brown's house in the woods on the north branch of Hickory Creek (east of Mokena). One historian asserts that it went southwest (on Archer Ave. to Justice Park), thence ... . Others assert that it went southward on State St. and Vincennes Ave. on the road to Blue Island, and thence southwesterly on what is now the Southwest Highway."^[3]

References

1. ^ Encyclopedia of Chicago
2. ^ Map of Hardscrabble Area, 1830
3. ^ "Nature Bulletin 738 Early Cook Conty Roads -- Park One". Nature Bulletins. Forest Preserve District of Cook County (Illinois). 1964-01-11. http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/natbltn/700-799/nb738.htm. Retrieved 2009-04-28. 
4. ^ Haunted Archer Avenue!
5. ^ Ursula Bielski, Chicago Haunts: Ghostlore of the Windy City, 2nd ed., Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 1997.
6. ^ Argonne National Laboratory
7. ^ Rollercoaster database for Playland Park