This postcard-inspired mural for the city of Blue Island welcomes drivers headed south on Western Avenue from Chicago.
Genevieve Bookwalter
As the city of Blue Island updates its streetscape along several miles of Western Avenue, one of the key ingredients in the plan is public art.
Enter Chris Campagna, an Eisenhower High Schoo graduate who continues to live here and raise his two sons.
Drive Western Avenue south from Beverly, and you’ll start to see his murals among the new lighting, sidewalks and signs: A stack of album covers leaning on the wall of Beverly Records. A postcard-style mural for Blue Island, with iconic city images bursting out of each letter.
Continue on to Olde Western Avenue Historic District, and you might find him working on his largest mural yet, which is 149 feet long on a concrete wall that holds up the Western Avenue flyover bridge.
“If I can create a destination point with my art, help the community, help kids, help businesses, that’s what I’m all about, about giving back to my community,” Campagna says.
Blue Island Mayor Fred Bilotto says Campagna approached the city about painting murals, and “we let him roll with one”: the postcard image. Now, he’s working on an “old market day image with horses, trading farmers and trolleys” in tones of sepia and Blue Island blue on the flyover bridge.
“We’re an extremely historical town,” Bilotto says. “We’re the oldest town in the suburbs, and we’re in the highest point in the county — the glacial Blue Island ridge.”
In the 1960s, though, Blue Island’s main stretch of Western Avenue was widened, and a new flyover bridge took cars about 60 feet up and over a neighborhood of about 5,000 people. That resulted in giant concrete walls looming behind homes in residential neighborhoods.
“I grew up in that neighborhood,” Bilott says. “It’s not very pleasing to see that kind of stuff just to make a car go faster through town. A lot of these walls are blank and old and have been tagged up multiple times.”
Blue Island buildings feature a variety of different architecture styles, all standing next to each other.
“Murals do a good job of blending things together and making things more pleasant,” the mayor says.
That’s something Campagna is happy to do. The lifelong South Sider’s clothes are speckled with paint from his projects, as is his car. He talks with a lit cigarette in his mouth, enthusiastically describing a bar where he recently repainted an old ghost mural on an outside wall. Friends say hi as he walks through town, where his father bought the family’s first home in 1976.
“My ties are bound with the city of Blue Island,” he says.
Campagna also is working with business owners to help spruce up their buildings’ exteriors, with the city helping to cover some of those costs.