Crazy Train
IF THE STRANGER’S FIRST IMPRESSION OF CHICAGO IS THAT OF the barbarous gridironed streets, his second is that of the multitude of mutilated people whom he meets on crutches.” Thus thundered William T. Stead, a pioneering English investigative journalist, in his 1894 book If Christ Came to Chicago! “The railroads which cross the city at the level in every direction…,” he continued, “constantly mow down unoffending citizens at the crossings, and those legless, armless men and women … are merely the mangled remnant of the massacre that is constantly going on year in and year out.”
This was a period in Chicago and in the United States when the threat of sudden, violent accidental death in
