Our Lady of the Viaduct

In 2005, something very curious happened in Chicago. It was not the White Sox winning the World Series, although Sox fans were blessed with once-in-a-generation success that fall. Nor was it anything attributable to the future president Barack Obama—at the time, he was a newly elected senator in Washington, D.C. In 2005, in Chicago, the Virgin Mary appeared in a way that could only happen in the City of Big Shoulders, within the dreary Fullerton Avenue viaduct beneath Interstates 90 and 94, known locally as the Kennedy Expressway. The origins of the Virgin of the Viaduct are a little murky, especially nearly twenty years after the fact. What has been established is the following timeline.

On April 10, a motorist using the Kennedy Expressway ramp at Fullerton Avenue noticed a curbside apparition (or salt stain) resembling the Virgin Mary. Given the image’s placement, it was really only visible to northbound motorists and the very few pedestrians who used the sidewalk. After the first report, word spread locally about a possible Marian apparition, and by April 19, the phenomenon was notable enough for the Chicago Tribune to send out a reporter to see it. A shrine had been erected by then, and the site was becoming more popular.

The image itself was blurry, like an impressionist painting, and reportedly displayed more clearly in photographs. The Virgin’s pose was reminiscent of Our Lady of Guadalupe or Lourdes, with her head tilted to her right, arms raised to her chest in prayer, and robes flowing about her body. It was a mix of colors in varying shades, but all were typical for Marian apparitions: blue, black, white, and gold.

“I was so stunned I couldn’t move,” said Obdulia Delgado, the first eyewitness recorded by the newspaper. “People were honking. . . . I don’t even know how I got home.” Once the shrine was built, the Illinois Department of Transportation agreed not to disturb the site.

The Archdiocese of Chicago was contacted for comment but was reluctant to endorse the apparition: “These things don’t happen every day,” a spokesman said. “Sometimes people ask us to look into it. Most of the time they don’t. [The meaning] depends on the individual who sees it. To them, it’s real. To them, it reaffirms their faith.”

Local Catholics came in droves to see the apparition with their own eyes. Soon the informal shrine was outfitted with a small altar and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of devotional candles, flowers, and “personal mementos,” as the newspaper put it. At one point, the Tribune reported upwards of seventy-five people visiting the shrine at one time—not too bad for a no-man’s-land of Chicago intersections.

But only a few weeks after its appearance, a disgruntled Chicagoan attempted to end the phenomenon on his own terms. Around 11:30 one evening, he approached the apparition and wrote BIG LIE in black shoe polish over a significant portion of the image. When city workers discovered the defacement the next day, they decided, at the suggestion of police posted to the area, to cover the entire apparition with the dull brown paint that the city often uses to cover graffiti and other unauthorized works of street art. Thus, it appeared that the short-lived miracle of Our Lady of the Underpass had come to a premature end.

But the Virgin of the Viaduct was not done with the city just yet. Two days later after it was defaced, it reappeared.

“Around midday, the suggestion of a veil covering a woman—an image that officials have characterized as a salt stain on the concrete—was visible through the paint,” the Tribune reported. “And then two employees of a nearby carwash used their lunch break to scrub away the paint and shoe polish, revealing the unmarred image once again.” That second news cycle was the last time the image was reported on by the local papers, save for a one-year anniversary piece by a Tribune columnist in 2006. In the two decades since then, stories of the image have popped up now and again online, but usually only as a curiosity.

Today, little of the image remains. A broad outline of Our Lady is visible, but most of it has been obscured by time. Some of the darker portions of the image can be seen, and a sliver of brown paint remains unchanged. Burn marks from a small fire, attributed to too many devotional candles, are noticeable. A few fresh candles and occasionally some flowers mark the spot. But the apparition itself is so faded as to have become part of the background.

Such a strange apparition—there for a few weeks and then gone just as quickly—leaves one to wonder just what Our Lady meant to tell us with it. Perhaps the apparition was a reassurance for the Chicago faithful: April 19, 2005, the day the apparition was first reported in local papers, was the same day Pope Benedict XVI was elected in Rome. More than two million Catholics lived in the Archdiocese of Chicago at the time, and the death of John Paul II and subsequent conclave were covered closely throughout the city. In that context, the apparition could be seen as a bookend to an authentically Catholic series of events.

Francis Cardinal George also loomed large in the local Catholic community at the time. When the Virgin appeared in the viaduct, he was in Rome voting for the new pontiff. Maybe it was a reminder that the Church is local and universal. The cardinal neither endorsed nor rejected the cult around the phenomenon. “God has many ways to stir up devotion in people’s hearts,” he said upon his return from the conclave. “It’s a purely natural phenomenon. If it’s helpful in reminding people of the Virgin Mary’s care for us and love for us, that’s wonderful.” He never visited the site.

There’s another way of thinking about the apparition. The Virgin of the Viaduct follows a long line of Madonnelle, as they are called in Rome, which can be roughly translated as “Madonnas of the street.” They can be found in every Catholic city in Europe, and they come in all shapes, sizes, and styles. They can be statues, mosaics, or paintings. Many are framed or are surrounded by a Baroque-style enclosure. Others are kept safe behind a set of metal bars. Sometimes a small altar (really a ledge) is maintained that houses candles, rosaries, or other mementos. By one count, Rome alone contains some five hundred of these street shrines. But in America, Madonnelle are exceedingly rare. There are certainly no others in Chicago. A cursory Internet search turns up intriguing chapels and churches throughout the country, but no street cults like those in Europe or the underpass.

The Madonnella of Chicago is unique. It appeared organically, in a country not known for street shrines, in a completely inhospitable location. The timing of its appearance was providential, even if the image itself needed some interpretation. Most importantly, it is still commemorated twenty years later. Given the image’s longevity, its odd way of sticking in the minds of the faithful, and its unambiguously divine overtones, maybe it is what those first eyewitnesses claimed it is: the Virgin Mary making her presence known.