Gone in a flash

Last week, Chicago reached a tentative agreement with the northwest suburb of Bensenville to raze more than 500 homes and businesses in the Dead Zone. In 2005, Chicago began to acquire the 300-acre swath of land in the eastern part of the town to make way for the expansion of O’Hare International Airport, set for completion in 2014. Photographer and Bensenville native Michael Jarecki, 25, has returned to the Dead Zone several times. What he has captured is a bizarrely empty place “like something from a Twilight Zone episode,” he says. “It’s eerily quiet except for the far-off sound of traffic on Irving Park Road and planes flying overhead.”

1 “The Dead Zone is a ghost town,” Jarecki says. “It’s kind of surreal, because everything is so overgrown. Houses and windows are boarded up. It looks like no one’s lived in this house for 20 years, but it’s only been a couple.”

2 Jarecki’s longtime family friend owned this Ace Hardware before it was acquired in December 2007. “My first job was working here,” he says. “I’m going to be sad to see it go.”

3 These “Don’t Meigs With Us!” signs were ubiquitous a couple of years ago, Jarecki says, when Bensenville officials waged legal battles to keep Chicago from bulldozing the area.

4 This building on York Road used to be occupied by Apollo Burger, “a mom-and-pop place for hot dogs, hamburgers and gyros as long as I can remember,” Jarecki says. “The empty sign, to me, represents the crushing vacancy of the area.”

5 “I’ve knocked on a lot of doors in the Dead Zone—this is one of them—but no one’s ever answered. The only people I ever encountered were a couple of City of Chicago workers, a woman and a man in their midtwenties. The woman said they were ‘inspecting the homes,’ probably looking for squatters.”

6 The eastern edge of the Dead Zone is populated by O’Hare construction vehicles. “It’s a menacing sight,” Jarecki says. “You can almost sense the bulldozers and dump trucks ready to come in and take over.”

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