Stony Island Avenue is a major street on the South Side of Chicago, designated 1600 East in the city's street-numbering system. It runs from 56th Street south to the Calumet River, then continues sporadically into the southern suburbs alongside the Bishop Ford Freeway, terminating at County Line Road on the border of Will and Kankakee Counties.
Running roughly parallel to the Illinois Central Railroad, the avenue forms the western boundary of Jackson Park — former home of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and the current home of the Museum of Science and Industry. Buildings of the University of Chicago line its western side, as does the national headquarters of the historically Black Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority. The Barack Obama Presidential Center is slated to be built in Jackson Park, across from Hyde Park Career Academy.
Stony Island becomes an extremely wide thoroughfare between 67th and 94th streets. At 71st there is a Metra Electric Line station; just south stood the famous Moo & Oink grocery store, which closed in 2011. At 73rd is the Nation of Islam's Mosque Maryam, and at 75th, Jackson Park Hospital. Where the avenue meets 79th and South Chicago Avenue, the ramps of the Chicago Skyway pass overhead — and nearby stands the New Regal Theater, famous as The Avalon, a Chicago Landmark.
How it got its name
At about 92nd Street, Stony Island passes to the west of the geographical feature it was named for: a stony hill that was once an island when glacial Lake Chicago covered the area thousands of years ago. Early pioneers gave the hill — in the present-day neighborhood of Calumet Heights, also known as Pill Hill — the name Stony Island, because from a distance it looked like an island set in a trackless prairie sea.
There really was a Stony Island, and what's left of it is still on the South Side, though you'd have to be eagle-eyed to find it. It was a rocky outcropping stretching about a mile and a quarter between Stony Island Avenue (1600 east) and Kingston Avenue (2500 east), from 91st to 94th Street. At one time it stood 20 to 25 feet above the surrounding lake plain. Residential development has since almost completely obliterated the original rugged surface — what might have made a remarkable park is now a forest of bungalows.
Stony Island offered a compact visual summary of much of the Chicago region's geological history.
Blue Island is a moraine — a glacial dumping pile, and so of relatively recent origin. Stony Island had a more complicated past: it is thought to have begun as a coral reef during the Silurian Period, well over 35 million years ago, when much of central North America lay beneath the sea. Sedimentation buried the coral under Niagara limestone, the bedrock underlying much of the Great Lakes area, producing a rock dome. Later, glaciers scraped and polished the limestone into characteristic striations and scattered massive boulders across the island.
When the last glaciers began to melt 10,000 to 35,000 years ago, the runoff formed Lake Chicago — a crescent of water covering the southern quarter of present-day Lake Michigan and nearly all of what is now Chicago. At its peak the lake sat about 55 feet higher than Lake Michigan today, submerging Stony Island entirely. As the water receded in stages, the island broke the surface and a gravel beach formed around its top.
In 1917 the Geographic Society of Chicago urged that Stony Island be preserved as a park, calling it a valuable geological and botanical asset — one of the only points inside the city where bedrock lay close to the surface, and evidence of glaciation could be seen. As might have been expected, nobody paid the preservationists any attention. In the 1920s, trenches for sewer and water mains were blasted through the limestone, the boulders were cleared, and the island was graded and paved. Today its existence is largely forgotten. Such is progress.