This is the south branch of the Chicago River. Bridgeport is just south of it. It’s an old, traditionally blue-collar, Irish neighborhood where the White Sox play at U.S. Cellular Field (formerly Comiskey Park). It’s also where the current Mayor Daley grew up.

I drew this page in the spring of 2004 after my friend Chris Dieters showed me around the near South Side. I was looking for a warehouse to photograph for this scene. It was foreign territory to me at the time, because I was a “North Sider” and rarely had occasion to venture south of Congress Parkway

(I-290), which unofficially divides the city into the two “Sides.” Roughly one year later I became a “South Sider,” and regularly went over the bridge drawn in panel one to visit my girlfriend (now wife). She actually used to live a few blocks from this warehouse!