The viaduct over the intersection of West Sherwin and North Greenview avenues once served as the backdrop for a short 2015 horror film, “The Underpass.”
Cameras focused on ceilings pocked with peeling paint, cobweb-covered lights and dirty murals.
While the main mural featured in the movie was fresh in 2014, the others had dingy water stains and peeling paint. Chipped and cracked ceiling beams, dead ivy shoots and the buzz of old fluorescent lights rounded out the scene.
Enter Jim Ginderske of Rogers Park, who decided the viaduct with the creepy and haunted feel should not send pedestrians on a walking detour around Jarvis Square to avoid it.
“That thing was a real horror show,” Ginderske says. “I got tired of looking at it.”
So in 2024 Ginderske got to work, scraping about five pounds of peeling paint off the posts, the walls and the ceiling. He painted the posts’ arches lilac to complement the yellow warning color at street level.
Then, Ginderske restored and repainted the wall that reads “Welcome to Rogers Park,” and “Rich in History/Rich in Diversity.”
Over the past two years, Rogers Park artist Candice Johnson (who goes by Candice With an Eye) painted white-with-black tree trunks resembling aspens on many of the posts, Ginderske says.
Aaron Wooten, who painted one of the original murals, repainted the wall with a new one portraying a Rogers Park street scene.
Kate Rad added her work, while Johnson and Tiger Bitch are working on another mural.
The multiple walls are a work in progress, with other community members welcome to share their talents there, too.
A group of kids who walked by added their handprints, and Johnson also put up a community bulletin board. A graffiti-and-sticker-covered stop sign remains. Ald. Maria Hadden (49th) helped secure new lighting.
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Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
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Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
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Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere / Sun-Times
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Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times
“We want this shared public space to amplify who we are as a community,” Ginderske says. “If you walk under there and feel depressed and worried you’re going to get jumped, and you can’t see anything, and there’s crap everywhere. We want people to feel lifted up when they’re passing through a shared space. That’s very important.”
Shenicka Hohenkirk, Hadden’s ward director, says the viaduct now reflects the feeling of bustling Jarvis Square.
With the underpass upgrades, “Getting off the CTA looks welcoming,” Hohenkirk says. “It brings the same energy that the businesses have on that corridor.”
The mural featured in the horror film reads “Seasons in Time.” It was done by artists Katherine Ross, Karen Zissis, Tim Morrison and others with the design firm Kinc and features images of the Rogers Park Hotel, the old Granada Theater, a CTA L Train, a pier stretching from the nearby beach, the former Heartland Cafe and a skyline view from Rogers Park. That mural remains untouched.