"Cutting across Chicago's South Side in a broad swath of concrete, steel, and overpasses, the Dan Ryan Expressway is one of America's busiest and most dangerous highways. Yet underneath the cacophony of its fourteen lanes lies an intriguing world of urban ecology and human networks. In Along the Divide, artist and photographer Jay Wolke unearths an urban ecosystem that weaves human and industrial elements into an essential feature of Chicago's identity." "Between 1981 and 1985, Wolke shot thousands of photographs and traveled thousands of miles on and along the Dan Ryan during the day and night, traveling up and down the expressway in an effort to capture it. In the twenty years since the photographs were taken, Wolke has organized his pictures into a complex and fascinating portrait of this iconic highway, which he characterizies as an "arterial organism" with its own "cycles and flows, causes and effects." The book's dynamic, artistic narrative explores the Dan Ryan's enormous influence over the people who drive on it, the neighborhoods lined alongside it, and the industrial environs it weaves through."--Jacket.