Forgotten Lands, Places and Transit

Tucked off a narrow, unpaved dead-end road just south of the hamlet of Dover Plains in Dutchess County, New York , lies a place that seems suspended in time, and drenched in myth. That place is Oniontown . Despite being only roughly 1½ hours by car from the bright lights of New York City , it sits in what feels like a remote no-man’s-land of folklore, suspicion, and social neglect.  Richard Wilcox Home, 1947 . Getty Images Having recently driven through the Hudson Valley between New York and Boston, the area that I'd first heard about from Atlas Obscura came to mind again, especially with how rich of an area I drove through in comparison to the zeitgeist surrounding Oniontown. If you imagine a more neglected corner of the Hudson Valley where the trees close in, the pavement ends, and a single strip of gravel leads you toward the woods, well your imagination is going to be pretty close to Oniontown. The paved road ends, and beyond it you’ll find trailers, modest ranch-style house...

If you zoom far enough into Cook County’s parcel data , you’ll find something strange. Beneath the steady roar of the Eisenhower Expressway (I-290) under the lanes of traffic, the CTA Blue Line tracks, and the median embankments, lies a full grid of property parcels. Every one has a unique PIN, neat cyan lines drawn as though the houses, alleys, and corner lots were still there. To the eye, it’s all concrete. If you were only looking at the parcel fabric and not an aerial below it, you could be forgiven for thinking that it’s still a neighborhood. Rather, it is all that is left of the neighborhoods that were destroyed to create the Eisenhower, and these parcels exist for all of the Chicago area expressways. Cookviewer Image of Active Parcels as of 2024, even though none of these parcels have had any separate land uses since the Ike. Cook County’s parcel fabric is a digital layer that represents the county’s property boundaries, as an enormous and constantly updated spatial dataset that...