Suicide is Painless

A few years ago when I was back in The City, the word came down: the suicide ramps were being removed. Long time Chicagoans will remember (fondly or otherwise) the on ramps used to merge onto the Kennedy Expressway and the excitement they added to your drive. For everyone else, the issue was that a lot of the cross streets had on and off ramps onto this part of the expressway, meaning that there was very (very) little room to accelerate and merge.

Over the years the city had rebuilt a lot of the bridges (poorly I might add in that architecturally, they broke up the unity of design that was already present - this really started with the Democratic National Convention in 1996, but that's a story for another day) but in the summer of '09, they were going to remove the last vestiges of the old ramps to allow for longer merge lanes.

So I set out to get some shots before they disappeared forever. But how do you tell the story about the Kennedy Suicide ramps in a photo?

Here's what I came up with: