Chicago – Winter Snow

The “worst” CHICAGO winters of ’77 and ’78

We have been seeing pictures of the snow in North America in the last few weeks on the news and in media. It reminds me of when we lived there.

Our introduction to winter in Chicago was in the two “worst winters on record” for snowfall at that time – the winters of 77/78 and 78/79; over seven feet of snow accumulation. Amazingly I never missed a day’s work due to the efficiency of the snow plough teams, but that was partly due to where I lived and worked. Others were less fortunate and for some it would take nearly three months for their cars to be extracted from the side streets. I remember driving to O’Hare airport one morning in January 1978 to catch a flight to Philadelphia and hearing on the radio that the overnight low had been -29 deg F.

In the first winter we lived in the suburbs but by the winter of 78/79 we were in a high rise on the lake front six miles north of the Loop, the car was kept in an underground garage with direct access onto a “snow route” which enabled me to get to work just across the state line in Indiana without missing a beat! We had dumps of 24 inches, freezing rain and sheets of ice falling off the skyscrapers into the streets below – it was quite exciting for us ex-pats!

The images in the side streets were taken just the other side of the snow route that we lived on. My images are all digital scans of 35mm Ektachrome slides, which I used to process myself (how that came about is another story!).