It was hard to get the kids on the train to go north. Although they lived four blocks from the el most had never ridden it, most had never been downtown, even to look at the fabled Christmas windows at Marshall Field (once a Chicago landmark, now a colonial property of a Minneapolis conglomerate) and none of them had ever been north. When they found that they weren’t going to be killed going to and from Wrigley Field they started looking forward to the games.

Of all Chicago neighborhoods the most interesting to me are those on the far southeast side, where Dead Stick Pond fights for survival beneath the rusting sheds of the old steel mills. The whole history of the city is contained in four small neighborhoods there-South Chicago, South Deering, Pullman, and the East Side.

To see the true south side, drive south on 1-94, the Dan Ryan Expressway, away from the Gold Coast with its pricey restaurants and shops. The route passes first Jackson Street, where members of Chicago’s Greek community operate restaurants, then Cermak Road which which leads to Chinatown, then nods at 59th Street, which borders the world-renowned University of Chicago-my neighborhood-on its way to the very end of the city.

At 95th Street, where the expressway splits, offering the driver the choice between Memphis and Indiana, go east on I-94 toward Indiana. At 103rd Street the air becomes acrid. Even with the windows up and the heater or cooler turned off your nose stings and your eyes tear. Although the steel mills are dead and a third of the south side is out of work, enough heavy industry still exists to produce quite a stench in this old manufacturing corridor.

Out the window to your left a hillock dotted with methane flares stretches the mile from 103rd to 110th streets. This is the City of Chicago landfill, where we Chicagoans send our garbage. It’s almost full, and the question of where to dump next is just one of the pressures on Dead Stick Pond. The flares keep the garbage from exploding as the bacteria devouring our refuse produce methane. (When landfill runs under a road, as it does here, exploding methane can destroy large sections of highway.)