When I was 6 I took ballet class in the old morgue. In 1915 it was one of 32 buildings that made up the largest municipal tuberculosis sanitarium in the United States. The deadly white plague, transmitted by infected droplets, symptoms appearing weeks or years after exposure.
Peterson Park was referred to as “The San” and until 1974 it had the makings of a small town with its cottages, farm, church, and barber shop. Landscaped to perfection, an idyllic place to quarantine.
Most of the buildings remain, but several acres were reclaimed by forest. Now, in the middle of Chicago, a sewer cover sits between fallen logs and deer navigate the rubble traces of a sanctuary.
Sitting on my front steps, if I look at the forest closely enough through the fence, I catch glimpses of a scene I thought I had imagined as a child— a stone slab bench at the end of an inexplicable cobblestone road.